ER7212PC wireless clients dropping internet occasionally
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Hello,
Have an ER7212PC with 2 x EAP655 and 1 x EAP650. ISP is Sky Fibre and connection is direct from ONT to ER7212PC. I've come from a rock solid but simple ASUS DSL-AC68U setup as i wanted to get decent mesh in the house and PoE APs, so went with omada system.
While wired connections seem bullet proof (wfh all day) the wireless connectivity from some of our phones seems to drop out. Connected but no Internet. Pages won't load but a minute later they will, or you turn wifi on and off to get things back. I have been trying a bunch of tweaks to see if anything helps - various advanced Mesh and/or WAN settings toggled on and off - but nothing really helps. I've tried Cloudflare and Google DNS settings and that didn't help either. I've also updated to the latest beta FW and that hasn't helped.
I've now just switched on History for the clients and extended the LAN DHCP time to the max (throwing sink at this now). next time it happens i'm hoping i have something to spell out what's happening in logs during the disconnect. Till then would appreciate any advice on what may be happening?
cheers,
JC
Hi @JCUK
Thanks for posting in our business forum.
So, I read your post in the beta test thread. I need to verify that with the team since this feature has been removed. It was removed due to the log did not provide helpful information for customers and it is not helping but causing confusion to customers.
Let me explain what that means. Association timeout is a log to record the time that your devices fail to join the network from the EAP. It was removed from the log. And later on from the chart. This was removed a long time ago on the controller updates. I am not sure if it is normal to have this feature still exist on ER7212PC. But will report and confirm.
But this reflects that your mesh nodes are probably not in an ideal location. With your symptom, this concretes my confidence that your setup probably is not ideal. Symptom is that you can still get Internet access but it loads slowly sometimes. It seems to be that your device having a hard time getting a connection or roaming.
To fix this, you need at least a better location for the mesh nodes and enable roaming-related features.
- Make sure you enable Advanced Features to make all roaming features enabled.
- Make sure your 5GHz channel is clean. So that the mesh connection is stable. EAP is using hidden 5GHz to set up the mesh.
- Relocate your EAP mesh nodes. How to optimize wireless performance of EAP products Best to place your EAP close enough to have some overlapped area. This is ideal for hand over the connection to another node. Overlap like this. If you don't have the overlapped area, then your connection will be disconnected first and then reconnect to the WIFI. That's not roaming according to the design/plan because your physical location is not ideal for the mesh. So, this is rather critical.
Thanks for the response. I've re-enabled most Mesh Advanced features (but had these on before). I'm fairly certain my AP placement is good. They are in a triangle formation fairly equidistant but overlapping a little (confirmed with various wifi monitoring apps on my phone). One in the living room grnd floor (centre), one in the office 2nd floor (south) and one in bedroom 2nd floor (south).
I would also say that when the issue occurs, i'm downstairs right beside the central AP in the living room. Things will be fine, i will be connected to that AP and suddenly get a drop. So i'm not moving around here or anything, i'm observing this in a static position sitting in front of the tv etc.
I don't know what you mean by "Make sure your 5GHz channel is clean. So that the mesh connection is stable" - all of my APs are POE hardwired back to the Router. Only a few devices in my home are 5ghz, mostly the phones and tablets. Then a bunch of IoT things running on 2.4. I've tried switching channels and using AI Wan optimization to let it switch channels - no joy.
I was wondering if separating the channels onto different SSIDs would help? Also - i see there's beta fw available for the APs i have - happy to try those. Thanks for your help so far. Cheers
Hi @JCUK
Since you mentioned that you used Asus, I know home products usually sell products with this "mesh" as a selling point. Our Omada EAP mesh means wireless bridge. So, it's okay that we have a different understanding of this.
To achieve what you want, you need to enable Fast Roaming, AKA Seamless Roaming in home products. Enable other roaming-related features and you should have a similar effect to Seamless Roaming (802.11 k/v/r).
Monitor your network and let me know later on when you have some news for me. I'll keep following up on your case. 
@Clive_A - thanks will try that pinging to troubleshoot when it happens and i have some time. cheers
@dgrintz - thanks, yeah i think you're right and my understanding of mesh was off, so will def try switching mesh off to see if that helps. It's not a big house, so i suppose the overlap\power may be a bit much between APs, i could tune down the one's upstairs too if nothing else is working.
@KimcheeGUN - yes, clients have excellent signal when this happens. Typical scenario is on our phones, where suddenly webpage or youtube or tiktkok isn't loading (or in case of the latter starts saying 'network unstable') and eventually the full barred Wifi symbol on phone will have an exclamaition bang and report connected, no internet. Also, below is snip of my mobile in the same position i'm usually in when i've observed the disconnects, i don' thave the knowledge to know if the values indicate an issue so any advice apprecaited.
thanks all, will report back post Mesh=off
