Slow and unstable wireless backplane on BE85
Setup: Three BE85 wireless mesh routers, with ideal conditions, free line of sight approximately 6 meters apart. The backplane reports using 2.4, 5 and 6ghz frequencies. Disabled MLO and 6Ghz ssid for maximum wireless backplane availability. Each of the two computers connected BE85 has the same fixed target in connection preference, not auto.
Testing with both iperf3 and a regular ping test show latency spikes, dropped packets and generally high latency. The setup tests the backplane only, where two computers are connected with wired intel 225-v 2.5 Gbit NIC with cat6 cable to each separate BE85. The last BE85 is connected directly to the Internet.
Average local backplane ping with 100 tries shows:
Ping statistics for 192.168.71.250:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 97, Lost = 3 (3% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 3ms, Maximum = 109ms, Average = 7ms
Expected result is 0% loss, and approx 1ms or less rtt.
Iperf show 7% dropped packets already at 100Mbit/s UDP transfer, and the latency is so high that max TCP transfer capacity becomes only 300Mbit/s between the two computers with a single TCP connection. Multi connection test show that the available single TCP bandwidth should be more than 1.8 Gbit/s if there where not packet drops and latency issues.
In debugging I have tried testing/swapping Decos to identify malfunctioning hardware. This test is not conclusive, but if there is hardware issue then two units or more must be at fault. I deem it unlikely that my recieved units are in any way special.
Testing outside of backplane (wireless client) show much lower latency on average than wired to BE85 then wireless to the next BE85, but still has the same large latency spikes.
I have tried switching all normal and advanced settings that are available in the deco app to try to identify a single culprit, this includes mesh technology for each unit and access point modes. Also tried attaching to 10Gbit port and 2.5Gbit ports. Testing directly against the attached BE85 show that the NIC is 100% stable without any latency variations, showing that the issue is with the wireless backplane connection.
So far the 4x lower latency in the marketing material should be changed to 4x higher latency. Opening local resources like Hue app, Yale and similar is very unresponsive compared to my previous older wifi setup, taking several seconds more time to open than expected.
Hope this is a known issue with a known future fix, otherwise I will try to get a return on these. Was really hoping the wifi7 latency claims where true.