R850 - Strange TX Power Issues

[Vanquisher]

I seemingly am trying to figure out why my R850s are transmitting at such a lower power level. Both are spaced apart at a good distance and there is very little interference on the channels they are on. They are only transmitting at 10dbm on DFS channels which seems incredibly low for the US when the power allowed is I believe 23DBM. They have in the past been transmitting at 22dbm but are now stuck at 10dbm.

Throughput after I noticed the transmit power drop on these on the download side has dropped off considerably, it seems to be capped or struggling at around 650-700MBPS on 2x2 Wifi6 devices. Same room I always used to be able to get 800/800 easily.

Environment:

• Running latest version of Unleashed
• APs are powered by a POE++ Switch (Engenius ECS5512FP) at the full 5GBE backhaul. The AP detects it's powered by a bt switch as it sets that power level. LLDP is on.

Troubleshooting Steps:

• Tried a different switch with ++ power and it made no difference to the transmit power (10dbm only).
• I tried overriding the TX power in unleashed and I set it incrementally up by 3 settings from -10dbm to full. It made NO difference to the AP transmit power. It would not change from 10dbm.
• I verified it is in BT5 power mode via CLI. I also set BT5 power manually in Unleashed. No change to transmit power.

[Vanquisher]

Can confirm I see the same behavior power consumption. Most I have ever seen is 13.X W usage. Mine also are idle in the 10-11w range. I also have no issue on power budget since the switch has 420W of budget. Sorry to hear the adapter did not fix it but thanks for posting as I was about to buy them to test.

[CRSR]

Other than the AP's being totally broken with auto negotiation for bt/class5 power, I was able to confirm they will use more power only when performance is taxed.  This feels like a bug, but Im still working with support to figure out why this changed compared to older firmware.

With iperf3 testing, I'm only able to reach maybe 600Mbs for a single connection with the R850's.  Our older R700's would give maximum performance for a single connection (800-900Mbs).  If I start using more parallel connections, then I finally see the AP's begin to consume 19 watts+ power and max performance becomes achievable (but only by adding more connections).  I'm still working with support on this and it feels like there is some hidden QOS happening internally that limits a connection so it can never saturate the AP.

[Vanquisher]

Any update from you working with Support on this? I am having the exact same issues still. I am also seeing limited throughput in the ~600MBPS range when before at some point it was easily doing the 800-900 you were saying.

[CRSR]

They escalated my case to a higher engineer last week but heard nothing back since.

I can replicate this issue with the R610 as well, so this issue goes beyond just the newer AP's.  I'm guessing until this throttle issue is resolved, the R850/R750/R650 will never be able to achieve anything in the Gbs speeds as advertised, even in the best possible setup/scenario.  Even worse, adding another client while attempting to max out the AP results in the 2nd client just getting handicapped in the 10-50mbps range.  So its not a matter of client capacity, its something internal that is limiting speeds so bad that it throttles everything to maybe 600mbps max and refuses to go any higher.  Great if you want to save electricity, awful if you expect decent performance for clients.

[Vanquisher]

I have replicated as well across the R850s, R750s, and H550s that we have. Same issue. Max throughput in the 600mbps download range. It is strange because I am getting 800+ on the upload. Every AP is always choosing the lowest power mode it can operate in for some reason.