iPhone on 5GHz: I've been wondering why it defaults to 2.4GHz, too. It's been like that for a while, and I figured it was something particular to the iPhone wifi stack, rather than Omada. I'll try pushing it to a separate 5GHz SSID and see if that makes a difference.

 

Omada/OC-200: Omada running on a Raspberry Pi 3. AFAIK, this shouldn't affect clients on the AP, and is only used for fast roaming... right?

 

Roaming: Fast Roaming, Dual Band 11k Report and Force-disassociation enabled.

 

Mesh: not using it and it's disabled. All APs connected using ethernet cables.

 

Band steering & airtime fairness: aren't these useful for the wifi clients?

 

Ping from iPhone: pinging the router from the phone:

82 packets transmitted, 82 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 3.237/14.489/101.669/16.377 ms

 

I'll try what you've suggested and see whether the results are any better! Thanks

Hi @JeremyHiggs,

 

"AFAIK, this shouldn't affect clients on the AP, and is only used for fast roaming... right?"

Correct.  Only used for Fast Roaming and dynamic MESH reconfiguration (which you're not using).  I don't think it is used for band steering.

 

"Roaming: Fast Roaming, Dual Band 11k Report and Force-disassociation enabled."

Correct.  Though Dual Band report can be disabled if not using band steering.

 

"Band steering & airtime fairness: aren't these useful for the wifi clients?"

Definately turn off airtime fairness.  This relatively new wifi feature is very buggy and not all clients support it / support it well.  Some clients like HP Wifi Printers, some Nest devices may not connect at all with it enabled.  Airtime fairness is only potentially relevent if you have more than 30-50 wifi clients per AP, and then, like I said, it often causes more problems than it helps
 

Band steering is similar.  It's supposed to help / make things easier.  But like a lot of automation it doesn't always work the way you would expect, or at all.  I have experimented with it on my iphone XSM and it seems to more or less work correctly.  But for troubleshooting especially, it's best to turn it off and use separate SSID's for 2.4 and 5.8.  Then join your clients to one or the other -- not both.  This way you can control which devices are connected to what and know for sure what speeds / airlink rates they should be doing.

 

-Jonathan

I wanted to update on this. With the separate 5GHz network, it’s been working great! If the house was much larger and the reception wasn’t great (such that 2.4GHz would be needed), maybe it would be an issue, but it’s been great in this setting. I only wish that band steering would work better!

Hi @JeremyHiggs,

 

Great to hear things are working better for you.  Yes, I have found when testing band steering that when the mobile device is on the edge of good 5G coverage it "cannot device" whether it wants to be on 5.8 or 2.4.  It tends to flip back and forth, and during this time I have experienced high latency and data stalls / stutters.

 

By forcing clients onto 5G only (with a separate SSID), the device has no choice to negotiation slower and slower air link rates with the AP as signal levels decrease.  This behavior seems much more predictable in it's behavior and while speeds are impacted, latency more or less stays the same -- until the STA RSSI falls to much and there is a lot of packet re-transmission.

 

I worried about this same thing as well hoping that handing of to 2.4GHz would help me outside.  But, ultimately I just purchased an outdoor unit instead (in addition) and now have 5G coverage inside and outside my house.

 

For my phone it doesn't really matter that much anyway, as it transitions to cellular when it eventually looses Wifi signal outside.

 

-Jonathan

@JeremyHiggs  @JSchnee21 

 

Every now and then I experience the same on my 2 * EAP 225 (v.3, current latest 2.7.0 Firmware) with OC2000 setup
I know most fingerpointing goes to apple for their wifi setup (https://community.tp-link.com/en/business/forum/topic/150813?page=2) and I had success in a IOS reset as in article 150813 but the other day practically all my IOS devices were reconnecting constantly. Reboot of EAP's did not resolve

So I stumbled on this article - I split my 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz which does seem to bring resolve at this point. 

I had airtime fairness and mesh on (but do not use mesh) which I disabled too
Still wondering if/what TP Link can do to "fix" this. 

if I may ; Question @ Jonathan ; you think its worth a try to combine the bands again while keeping the other options as you state ?
And what is your opinion on WMM - as far as I can see its needed to get any decent ~ high ~ connection speeds

 

Thank you !

@Arjan,

 

WMM is required for 802.11ac (and possibly for 802.11n) so you definately want this to be enabled.

 

Whether or not Band Steering works, or works well, is a more complicated issue.  It's not really anyone's fault, per se, but band steering as a technology just doesn't work that well.  Different vendors implement it differently, and I see a lot of complaints on Reddit and other places with people having wireless issues and it is often band steering related.

 

But you can always experiment with it, just create a third wireless SSID and enable it to use both the 2.4 and 5.8GHz radios.  Then enable band steering in the OC200.

 

Finally, connect select wireless devices (STA's) to just the one SSID for testing.

 

I do this myself.  I have the following SSID's at home:

myssid               (2.4GHz only)

myssid_5GHz    (5.8GHz only)

myssid_dual      (both 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz w/Band steering)

 

I've tested my iPhone XSM on the "myssid_dual" SSID.  The band steering "works" per se, but at the coverage age of the 5.8GHz signal it's flaky, bounces back and forth, and displays high latency until you get far enough away that the phone doesn't see the 5.8GHz network anymore.

 

-Jonathan