Dell Wireless 1820A & AP230, only connect at 400Mbps

[sebus]

Replaced (same physical place, same wifi in laptop)

Zyxel NWA1123-ACv2 with AP230

On 5Ghz connection speed dropped from 768Mbps to only 400Mbps (that is HALF)

Not something I expected.

Played with all the settings available in Connect, no difference, cannot make it nowhere near the same speed.

Anybody has any ideas?

Thanks

sebus

[sebus]

Thanks guys, but still none of the above changes the fact that cheap-er Zyxel AP seems to provide way better connection speed than AP130/AP230 (tested with both), which does not look correct to me.

I do not expect 1.3 Gbps, but at least would like to match the Zyxel 866.5…

I compared AP230/AP130 to Zyxel in exactly the same physical conditions (disconnect one, connect the other one)

[Tomasz]

Hi Sebus,

MCS data rate is chosen by a transmitting device algorithm (client or AP - it’s independent in each direction) based on several criteria, in particular RF-related indicators such as SNR. Are both APs in the same distance to the client device, ie. is the RSSI on the client equal? Are both APs on the same channel or not? If not, what other traffic (nearby APs, client devices) appears on the channels?

Just FYI, you won’t get 1.3 Gbps datarate unless you have 3x3 MIMO WLAN on a device, here you can find some examples: clients.mikealbano.com

BTW forcing 5 GHz might produce other issues when a dual-band device keeps trying to connect to the SSID on 2.4 GHz band because of its internal algorithm decision flow. Without that, clients are going to jump between bands occasionally though. So if separate SSIDs are not an option, I’d recommend to consider ‘Encourage’ instead of ‘Force’.

Hope that helps,

Tomasz

[StephanH]

As I said, if you want to know what is happening look at the packets in the air, they don't lie and in the beacons you can see what the AP offers and what the client chooses from the offer.

[StephanH]

Hello,

You don't have to convince me. I understand that you cannot set the channel selection on your client and that therefore only bandsteering on the AP helps (since you want to use one SSID in both frequency bands).

I just wanted to point out, that by wifi standard, it is a decision of your client and therefore bandsteering is only a workaround. But it's nice if it works.

Regarding frame aggregation: According to standard 802.11ac, frame aggregation is ALWAYS used here and therefore it does not have to be explicitly turned on. For example see here:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/80211ac-a-survival/9781449357702/ch03.html

Specifically: "802.11ac, however, adds an interesting new take on aggregation: all frames transmitted use the aggregate MPDU (A-MPDU) format. Even a single frame transmitted in one shot is transmitted as an aggregate frame."

[sebus]

Also tested another different machine, which also “locks” at max 400Mbps on 5Ghz

So something is definitely not correct