Speed issues with Zoneflex R300

[francisco_marti]

Hey Everyone,

I'm a first time poster and honestly at my wits end trying to figure out why I am having speed issues with these APs. We have 25 Zoneflex R300 AP's connecting to our L3 switch broadcasting dual channel SSIDs.

The problem we're seeing is that the AP's seems to only be connecting at about half the speed of our primary connection.

We have a 200mbps/200mbps fiber line coming in from the ISP. Direct Ethernet connections show that we're getting the full speeds to the switch. The AP's are auto negotiating at 1000Mbps at full duplex.

The devices directly connected to the AP's less then 2 feet away, are showing varying speeds.
At maximum we see 100mbps/100mbps but it varies even down to ~2mbps/2mbps. I've manually upgraded the firmware on the devices with no luck.

There is not too much EMI in the office so it wouldn't appear that the issue is interference. We also have ruled out the issue being tied to a specific PC as we've ran testing on phones and laptops. I'm typically used to using these AP's with a Zonedirector but at this time we do not have one at hand.

Anyone have any ideas?

[max_o_driscoll]

Before the clever folk chime in...

just to confirm, there is no meshing involved with these APs (it has a dramatic effect on bandwidth). Oops - just reread the Autonegotiation at gig speed to AP.

Also connection speed is heavily depend on the clients hardware. Fast new AP of will have max throughput throttled by a b/g or single antenna n device.

[francisco_marti]

Hey there! Thanks for the reply. So each AP has a basic setup, no meshing, connecting to a PoE switch then to our ISP router. We have each AP setup running dualband 2.4ghz and 5ghz. I've tested both and have received about the same speeds on each not breaking the 100mbps barrier.

I've used several devices to run the tests (Macbook, Lenovo Laptop, Surface Book and even cell phones). Hardwired we're blazing fast at 200mbps but wirelessly they all get cut in half at 100mbps. We've connected both to the switch and to the router directly and we receive full bit rate on hard wired connections but all of the R300's we throw on it topple out at 100mbps. Upgraded the FW on each as well.

[max_o_driscoll]

There is no correlation between hard wired and wifi speeds. Just because 200 comes out of a wired pipe on your device does not mean you can get that from wifi on the same device. Also real world throughput is best obtained by downloading large files (mcafee dats at 100mb a good for this) and timing it, old school but much better than looking at a connectoid and believing what it tells you.

Back to same old stuff, details, details. Need to eliminate the possibility your devices are the problem (if indeed there is a problem). Need to make absolutely sure the wifi chipsets on the devices are capable of more than 100 otherwise there is room for barking up wrong trees! 

Ideally you should be able to say that you have seen 100+mbs wifi with these devices in other scenarios.

[francisco_marti]

Yes, I know the NICs for ethernet and WiFi are different I listed out that I even used different branded devices getting the same speeds. For example the surface books wireless chipset is the Marvell Avasatar 88W8897 which boasts the following features:

IEEE 802.11ac (draft) compliant, 2x2 MIMO spatial stream multiplexing with data rates up to MCS9 (866.7 Mbps)
Bluetooth 4.2 + High Speed (HS), supports Low Energy (LE)
Near field communication (NFC) connectivity technology, per NFC Forum specification, for short-range, contactless communication

It would make sense if the issue I was experiencing was tied to one device but looking at every NIC topping out at 100mbps even on a laptop less then a year old? Seems unlikely.