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?

[michael_stellma]

The R300 is a 802.11n 2x2:2 AP with 300Mbit/s max phy rate.. It's unlikely you will get troughput rates much higher than 150 Mbit/s. Try to use 5Ghz only and make sure that 40MHz channel width and short guard interval is set for that radio.

[john_d]

Agreed with Michael -- 2x2 802.11n (with a 300mbit PHY rate) is extremely unlikely to see anywhere near 200mbit. Even assuming no loss due to noise or poor SNR, wifi's TCP throughput to PHY rate ratio is 1/2-2/3 at best.

So, getting around 100/100 is probably expected. If you require higher bandwidth, you will likely require 802.11ac AP's, with 40 or even 80MHz channeling considering the clients are 2x2.

Also be aware that a lot of lower end laptops and most smartphones don't come with the most spectacular wifi cards, and they are often limited by CPU or their interconnect (PCIE or SD) and cannot exhibit the max rates of 802.11ac.



As far as seeing less than 100mbit, that seems odd. I would try some static channel assignments to make sure automatic channel switching is not resulting in dropouts. I would also troubleshoot with a 5GHz-only network to see if it's 2.4GHz that's being slow for you. Unfortunately some buildings have inherent sources of interference that prevent good data rates on 2.4GHz.

[francisco_marti]

Yeah, understood. It seems to just be a limitation of the Ruckus equipment I wasn't aware of. Good to know for future references though. I did try both 2.4ghz and 5ghz and also checked for various types of EMI but there was no change in how the equipment behaved. I would challk up the speed variances to probably an issue with that particular macbook