Here you can see that the Wireless settings for the 5.8GHz radio can be set on the root node.  In my case the "Office" AP is the root node, which is linked with the Outdoor unit.

Oh, and if the 5.8GHz is only being used for MESH backhaul, you can set it to 802.11ac only.  Turning off the older protocols (a & n) if they are not needed improves the BW efficiency and throughput somewhat.  You'll need to leave the 2.4GHz radio set to "802.11b/g/n" as there are still lots of b, g, and n clients out in the wild

@JSchnee21 Yes--as soon as I mentioned going onsite, I realized that the way to go to 2.4GHz was through each AP, which I did. I need to check on the channels. They are not all using one channel, but a couple are, I believe. To answer your quesiton, I am using CPE510.And no, Omada cannot mess with the CPEs. I need to be onsite to do that. I'll set the 2.4 to 20MHz

Another person helping me suggested assigning an IP to each AP instead of using DHCP. I need to go onsite and find out what range of IPs the router is using for DHCP. I've always found that if I can exclude a range of IPs, I can then assign those to my devices.

Most of the boats are fiberglas, but there are those nasty metal poles sticking up from the deck! So far, most people are getting decent connectivity.

This is my first mesh install. I have used the CPEs for several clients before, but that was just supplying a link for a remote location. So, thanks for your suggestions I'm working on making the network more efficient. So far, I hear that it is going a lot better than the previous network which was not a mesh and only provided limited connectivity.

Art

@JSchnee21 Yesterday I went to 2.4GHz on all APs. I then checked the APs in Omada and noticed that utilization is higher when everyone is using 2.4. Not sure if that matters, as tht utilizaiton is always varying. BTW--it rates the utiliization as a % utilized. I have no idea how it determines if the utilization is accepatable or high, but I suppose if it gets too high then it will kick clients off. Then I'll need to figure out what to do.

Hi @Byteguy,

Glad to hear things are going better.  You don't need to touch each AP to limit the SSID to only use the 2.4GHz.  In Omada, there's a pullup from the bottom.  Edit your SSID to limit it to only one radio and apply.  This will update all adopted AP's.

Each 2.4GHz radio definately needs to be on it's own channel.  Otherwise each AP will see a lot of chatter from it's neighbors.  There are only 3 non-overlapping channels in the 2.4GHz spectrum.  1,6, and 11.  but you have 5 AP's.  Your best bet is to turn down the transmit power and alternate as I proposed yesterday.  This is what's called a honeycomb configuration.

11                      1

             6

1                       11

This way each AP's nearest 2.4GHz neighbors are on another channel.  If you stand where the 6 is (assuming this AP is in the middle) and use inSSIDER or similar to see the signal levels of each AP.  The 4 corners should be set to approx -80 dBA (by adjusting their transmit power).  If you are halfway (distance) between any two APs' (e.g. between an 11 and a 1; or the 6 and either 11 OR 1) you want to aim for approximately 70-75 dBA from each of the two AP's.  That is to say as clients transit through the half way point from a 1 to an 11, they should handover at approximately that point.  I would set the 5GHz to high as it doesn't transmit as far, and you want maximum signal for the backhaul.

Make sure you have Fast Roaming enabled and you can experiment with "Force Dissociation"

How many 2.4Ghz clients are you seeing pe AP.  Ideally there should be anywhere from 5 to ~25 per AP.  Ideally 10 or fewer per AP would be concurrently streaming.  Percent utilization is more of a reflection of air time.  That is to say how busy clients are UL and DL.  It doesn't impact the total number of non-active client (up to a point).  But as the AP becomes more heavily loaded 50%, 70% 90% it means that multiple active clients are competing for the resources from that AP.  And everyone connected through that AP will slow down.

Also, keep an eye on the CPE utilization.  I'm not sure how much data you can push through these.  But I would suspect it is only 150-200 Mbit/sec.  Assuming your Comcast even goes that fast.  So that's really only 15-20 TOTAL clients concurrently streaming/DL at 10Mbit/sec.

I should add, Verizon cellular limits all of my mobile devices (phones, iPads, etc.) to 5 Mbit/s from Netflix and it seems to work just fine.  But if you have customers with Rokus, Apple TV, Fire Sticks, Chromecast, etc. and a real TV, 5 Mbit/sec is not that good.

@JSchnee21 Thanks. Good info. You were talking about leaving the 5GHz on high power. Isn't that irrelavent if I'm limiting all APs to 2.4?

I'll check the other settings. I did get a comment from a guy who is helping me set up the APs. Wanted to know how come he couldn't log onto 5 GHz any more. And seemed to indicate he was noticing a slowdown in the network. I think he was having a problem with podcasts. I told him that they didn't require all that much bandwidth and would have to do some tweaking.

I'm thinking I'll need to go down there for some speed tests. I'll definitely need to be there to do the observations that you talked about.

As usual, thanks for your help. You've been helping me understand the whole thing.

Art

Hi @Byteguy,

I'm still not sure you're following.  The 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz radios on each and every AP need to be turned on.  But you are limiting the SSID on the 5 AP's that the clients connect to only use the 2.4GHz radios and preserving the 5.8GHz radios for the wireless MESH.  Just to confirm, no end users should be connecting to the CPE's.  They should have their own separate SSID password and only the two CPE's are on this air link.  Each CPE is then Ethernet connected, one to your wireled office network, and one to the EAP root Node.

Each AP's radio's transmit power 2.4 & 5.8 per AP are individually adjustable -- so that's 10 radios to potentially adjust.  To start, I would set all of the 5.8GHz AP radios to High (22 dBm, max is 22) and all of the 2.4GHz AP radios to Medium (15 dBm, max is 23).  Roughly how far apart are each of the AP's? 

Then adjust each of the 2.4 GHz radio's power up or down a little bit  based on your site survey (using inSSIDER or similar).  For the 5.8GHz you may get slightly better SNR if you adjust them down a little bit from max.  Use the MESH link speed and RSSI information in Omada to judge this.

I'm not sure which EAP's you have.  225-Outdoor?  These have 2x2 radios for 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz.  Max theoretical air link speeds are ~300Mbit/sec for 2.4GHz@40Mhz 2x2.  and 866Mbit/sec for 5.8GHz @ 80MHz 2x2.

"802.11ac: 5G:6.5 Mbps to 867Mbps(MCS0-MCS9,NSS = 1 to 2 VHT20/40/80) 2.4G:78Mbps to 300Mbps (MCS8-MCS9 VHT20/40, NSS=1 to 3)
802.11n: 6.5 Mbps to 300 Mbps (MCS0-MCS15, VHT 20/40)"

But in practice, these yield a maximum usable, application level throughput of:

~60-80 Mbit/s per 2.4GHz client (2.4GHz @ 20MHz @ 1x1) -- but since the AP is 2x2 -- Multiuser aggregate thoughput per AP could be as high as ~160-200 Mbit/sec

~350-450 Mbit/per 5.8GHz client (5.4GHz @ 80MHz @ 2x2)

So.  What we want to do is:

Aggregate the connections of ten to fifteen active 2.4GHz users (each of which is throttled to 10Mbit/sec) per AP and uplink their data back to the Root node via the 5.8GHz wireless MESH.  Note that the BW on the 5.8GHz is more than enough to handle the aggregate throughput of enough 2.4Ghz clients to saturate the AP.  This extra head room is needed because multiple wireless MESH AP's (e.g. all 4) are all going to be trying to do the same thing at the same time as they transmit back to the root node -- so this "extra" bandwidth is shared among the four wirelessly connected MESH APs.

Now.  When we get back to the root node, if all of the AP's are busy, we're still going to have a potential problem because the CPE uplink (to the wired network and Comcast) still only supports an airlink speed of ~300Mbits which will provide at most ~200Mbit/sec of throughput.  So once your whole network hits ~20 active users if each is streaming at 10 Mbit/sec your CPE is going to become a bottleneck.

Hope this helps.

-Jonathan

"Wanted to know how come he couldn't log onto 5 GHz any more. And seemed to indicate he was noticing a slowdown in the network. I think he was having a problem with podcasts. I told him that they didn't require all that much bandwidth and would have to do some tweaking."

So, 2.4GHz would in theory be slower than 5.8GHz, but if you are truly limiting each client to 10Mbit/sec anyway this won't make any difference.  Most streaming audio uses much less BW than video (as you would expect).  But there are some specialty audiophile codecs which can require very high bitrates as the audio is losslessly compressed -- or not compressed at all.

But a normal Podcast normally uses almost no data, e.g. 10-100 Mbytes and should download in less than a minute or two.  Recall that 10Mbit/sec is ~1MB/sec (e.g. divide by 8).  So if the Podcast, for example, is ~100 MB (usually ~1MB/min) then it will take around 100 sec with the throttle.  Of course in todays age 2 min to download a podcast "feels" like an eternity.

As you continue to tune the network and understand where the various bottlenecks are, you may need to adjust the per user BW limitation (e.g. 10Mbit/sec) up or down a little based on the total number of actively streaming users you tend to average.

-Jonathan

Here are some more screen shots on how to configure things.  SSID Config for guests (1&2) -- notice 5GHz unchecked..  Fast Roaming (3) enabled.  Band Steering OFF (4).  MESH Config (enabled). MESH Info/Status (6 & 7). AP Radio Configs (ignore power and channel) 8 & 9 -- notice both radios enabled.

Airtime Fairness and Channel Limit OFF

@JSchnee21 OK, I seem to have a project here to occupy my time this Memorial Day Weekend! I'll get on it. Thanks so much for taking the time to explain. I've been searching the TP-Link site for this kind of info but it is not easy to find. That coupled with the fact that those manuals are usually written by someone whose second language is English. (I had an opportunity to "translate" manuals from the Easus site several years ago. Told them if they were going to sell their product in a country that primarily spoke English, then someone from that country should write the manual. They agreed, I rewrote the manuals, and they gave me the software!)

Art