@Byteguy Almost forgot--I'm using EAP-225 outdoor APs

Hi @Byteguy,

So I've been tooling around the house on my iPhone XSM for the past ~10 hours or so, connected to the Marina_Guest SSID I created for you as an example.  It's 2.4GHz only and limited to 10Mbit/sec UL & DL (aka 10000).  It's been working great (granted I have a strong wifi signal as I'm physically close to my AP's).  Netflix HD, Youtube 1080P60 HDR, Pandora, Podcasts, web browsing, email, Apple App updates, etc. are all working great.  Note that you should double check your Comcast business connection to see whether or not it has symmetric DL & UL speeds.  DOCSIS devices (aka cable modems) generally do not, but this might be different for business class service.  All I'm saying is you may need to limit your UL throttle to be lower than your DL throttle per client if you broadband UL BW is less than the DL.

Anywhoo, there's one other setting I wanted to point out.  Now you have to be careful with these, so you may want to wait to try them out until everything else is working well.  On each radio, on each AP (conifgurable through Omada, but you have to "touch" each setting) are two load balancing options.  Now in your case, if you're only using the 5G radios for backhaul, then you should not apply load balancing to the 5G radios.

These options are designed to try and spread out wireless clients across multiple, proximal AP's, so that one AP doesn't get overloaded with clients and so that clients are encouraged to look for AP's with a better signal.  But, if you set them too agressively, you run the risk that clients will fail to associate (or stay associated) to any of the AP's.

Once everything is up and running, and you have all of your clients connected (I realize this is a moving target).  Take a look at the number of clients per AP, which AP they are connected to (versus where they should be connected based on physical proximity) and their RSSI's (Clients page in Omada).  To have a good connection, clients should have an RSSI of ~75 or better (aka smaller, e.g. -70).  But my Nest Doorbell, for example, has a crappy Wifi antenna, and actually works okay at -85-88 dBm.  So your mileage may vary.  Anyway, the settings below should give you a good starting point to get started.

In general, for optimal performance Max associated clients, PER AP,  could be anywhere from ~20 to ~50.  But it really depends on what percentage of them are actively streaming.  It's okay to have more (e.g. 40 or 50) if only a small handful (e.g. 10-20) are actively streaming at a time.

Similarly, the client's RSSI on the AP (only visible on the AP or through Omada), and the AP's RSSI on the client (aka the number of Wifi bars the client displays), together with the SNR (signal to noise ratio) directly impacts the negotiated rate of the connection between the client and the AP.  Similarly, if signals are very weak, in addition to having a low connection rate, there will be lots of dropped frames and re-transmissions.  So you really want clients to have at least an RSSI of -85 (no less, e.g -90), but ideally they would be in the -50 to -75 range.

BUT, before doing too much (or anything) with these kinds of settings.  Make sure your 2.4GHz radio transmit power is not set too high.  The AP's can transmit much stronger signals than the mobile clients can return.  When the AP transmit power is set correctly, most STA's will correctly roam to the nearest AP on their own.

Hope you're having fun.  All the best.

-Jonathan

@JSchnee21 Thanks. One of the marina tenants is, apparently, an ex-Microsoftie. He was down at the marina doing some signal strength testing and I spoke with him today. He is writing up his findings and will send them to me.

I told him that I had just redistributed the channels to be more efficient. I also mentioned what I found on the TP-Link site and from  you about reducing the transmit strength on the APs. I worried that doing that could result in poorer connections. I told him that,from what I have found out, too high a signal would cause the APs to not function in the mesh like we want them to and perhaps cause connections to continually jump from one to another.

The guy mentioned the problem we encountered last week. The network was acting very strangely. I had the marina manager cycle the switch and it all straightened out. That switch was not a piece of equipment that I installed. Could be it is time to replace it.

I will do some screenshots as well as copy the network map and post it for you.

Sounds good,

If you don't need any sophisticated capabiltiies (PoE, Layer 3/routing, multiple VLAN's, remote management and monitoring)  these little switches from Netgear are great and inexpensive.  They come in a couple different quality/feature levels.  I've found that the power adapters in the ProSAFE/Smart series switches are a lot more robust and reliable than the entry level switches.  And the web management features, error and traffic monitoring, etc. is nice.

$50 on Amazon

NETGEAR 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Smart Managed Plus Switch (GS108Ev3) - Desktop, and ProSAFE Limited Lifetime Protection

$113 for the 16-port

NETGEAR 16-Port Gigabit Ethernet Smart Managed Plus Switch (GS116E) - Desktop, and ProSAFE Limited Lifetime Protection
 

TP-Link makes switches as well, but I don't have any experience with them.

This one supports PoE, Fiber GBIC's, VLAN's and such for $138 (only 8 ports)

TP-Link Jetstream 8 Port Gigabit Poe Switch | Smart Managed | 8 Gigabit Poe+ Port + 2 SFP, 116W | Up to 512 Vlan | 8K Mac Table | L2/L3/L4 Qos | Link Aggregation(T1500G-10Mps)

Ideally your Guest Wifi traffic would be segmented from your office business traffic on a separate VLAN or subnet.  Similarly your OC200/AP management connections should be "out of band" as well.  But this starts to make the configuration much more complex.

-Jonathan

@JSchnee21 This is making a lot more sense--have a router that controls the marina network instead of relying on the Comcast modem/router.

This might solve the problem.  I'll check those out and recommend one to the manager.

Today I changed the channels to more evenly distribute the network. Today, though, we're getting a lot of disconnects. APs are going offline and then online, Some are isolated and then found. Obviously clients are being kicked off and getting back on. Looks more and more like a hardware problem--most likely the switch.

@JSchnee21 Here's what is going on:

Changed the channels of the APs as recommended.

Changed 5GHz to 80 MHz with power on High

From what you said, if the root AP is changed, it should propogate to the others, right? Maybe I'll jsust go into each AP and set the channel width and power there.

Changed the 2.4 GHZ to 20 MHz with power on medium.(but left Elizabeth Ruth at high). We'll see how that goes.

As for limits, I've configured the controller to limit 10240 up and down but I always get lost in all the menus! Now where the heck did I do that? I'll keep looking Someone (maybe you) suggested to just do a site limitation instead of limiting individual users.

Heard from that "expert" the other day. I don't think he knows as much as he wants me to think, I don't even have to talk to him, but I was being polite. He said he thought it was a bad idea to limit the channel width and the power. He complained that reducing the power would kick a lot of people off the network. As I understand it, less power means less interference with other APs

You asked the distance between APs. Let's see if this map will show it correctly:

In answer to another of your quesitons--I'm in WA state. On Puget Sound, a number of live-aboards in this marina.

The other day I turned off 5 GHz for clients and got a lot of flack. The know-ti-all guy told me it created all sorts of problems, but really couldn't point to one. Another person who I deal with down there had a range extender on his boat and it stopped working. After he finished whining, I told him if he switched the extender to pick up the 2.4 GHz instead of the 5GHz. it would work again. But I re-enabled the 5GHz and he was happy. Decided to tweak other areas first.

I believe we will be placing a 6th AP mid-way along A-Dock tomorrow afternoon. AP labeled Elizabeth Ruth had been located at the left end of A dock as a temporary location. It was moved to the mast of the Elizabeteh Ruth a couple days ago. Will probably be relocated up toward D-Dock when the boat moves next week. That is why I want an extra AP down at A-Dock. Our limiting factor is usually where the heck to plug it in!

That's it so far.

@Byteguy Forgot to mention. We're not using a Guest logon. Not sure if we need to. The only people using this network are the marina tenants. No staff. There is actually only one full time employee and she's the manager. She uses a guy down on C-Dock to do cleaning and maintenance, but he's not paid, except he probably gets free mooring. That's the guy who I deal with when I'm on the dock.

@Byteguy I'm wondering when I shut the 5GHz down on the APs if that also shut down backhaul capability. The "expert" guy said performance really sucked after I did that. Do you suppose you cannot shut down client's use of 5GHz without shutting down the backhaul?

Hi @Byteguy,

Please follow the screen shots I posted earlier.  This has all of the correct settings to limit the marina users SSID to 2.4GHz while keeping the AP's 5.8GHz radios on.  Also its essential that you implement global user DL & UL throttling.  I've included screens shots for this as well.  It's not managable to limit one client at a time.  Users will have to accept slower speeds per connection so that everyone can share.  Otherwise the wireless mesh will get overloaded very quickly.

That said, I don't think the EAP's can MESH on the 2.4GHz channel at all.  So if you had really turned off the 5.8GHz radios, I would have expected the wireless EAP's to have become isolated and cut off from the root node.  But, I've not tested it myself.

If you think the issue you saw was from the network switch/route instead.  Feel free to revert to your original configuration if yoiu feel like that was working better for you.

-Jonathan

@JSchnee21 I've implemented most of the stuff. Installed a 6th AP today. Will work on the rest of the settings you suggested. People in the marina are generally happy.

Oh--the 10 Mbps limit was inplemented system-wide, not by individual clients. I don't need that much busy work to do!

I think the guy who was complaining was unhappy he couldn't  use 5GHz. His reasoning was that in the 2.4GHz band, you have limited channels while in the 5GHz you have a whole bunch of them.

Now I don't really know much about how the 5GHz channel allocation works. As you said, the Mesh uses one channel on the %GHz band for its communication.

This particular guy decided he wanted to log onto a specific AP rather than take what the Mesh gives him. Perhaps you can shed some light on this.