Instant On - Wireless

Folks, I have 4 x AP22 connected to 1930 8G CL4 PoE switch. I have a Gigabit internet connection connection (cable modem), on ethernet I get 980 Mbps and more, on WiFi it used to work great until recently, but since a week or so I get currently only 2.5 Mbps, sometimes up to 60 MBps (I am using the Ookla Speedtest), both on my MacBook M2 and iPhone15. At least knowingly I have not changed anything, neither configuration, nor AP location, nor wiring. Honestly I am a bit overwhelmed with all the settings in the app/WebUI. Any suggestions how to run this down?

Thanks a lot in advance.

hello, any hints?

OK, again responding to myself. Maybe this benefits others with similar problems.

What I firstly did was to disconnect each AP22 one by one. With this I forced to have the clients connecting to another AP than the usual one. All ran fine, speed (up to 480 mbps) was back. One of the AP22 (btw. the one with the most connected clients) seems to be faulty. I swapped the AP22 with another one in my house which is seldomly used, so far all good. With this exercise I was able to narrow the issue to the AP22 device itself.

The only thing I am puzzled about is: Usually electronic devices do either work fine or do not at all. Why is the 'faulty' AP22 just running poor (2 mbps) in download (50 mbps upload is good)? Anything I could do to find and resolve the root cause before replacing it?

Hi LiGro,

Troubleshooting wireless is more complicated than Ethernet because, well, the addition of wireless. Radio signals do not follow a set path. They bounce off walls, they interfere with each other, they do strange things.

Do you have a tool like WiFi Explorer or NetSpot to verify the channel, signal strength, other radio activity in the area?

Are you using WPA3 encryption? It increases encryption/decryption/processing time for all devices. I think I found that it was just too much for the older AIO devices and iPhones. WPA2 is more than sufficient, IMHO.

Is the problem experienced with both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands? Narrow it down. Are you using DFS channels? After a bit of research, investigation and troubleshooting I have restricted my 5 GHz AP radios to channels 36, 44, 149, 157. Do you have any devices that refuse to connect to some channels? I know for a fact that Rokus will not connect to some channels. I discovered this when trying to figure out why it refused to connect to a closer AP when my Amazon Fire Sticks did the right thing. After a bit of googling, I verified it. This is why I have limited the 5 GHz radios to only 4 channels.

Have you tried reducing power and setting your AP(s) to a specific channel (both bands) to eliminate conflicts that WiFi Explorer or NetSpot reveal? I don't know the specifics about when AIO tunes the channels but when I originally experienced similar issues to what you described, I set everything manually. This helped a lot. Over time I tuned and now I let AIO choose the channels (5 GHz restricted, as per above - 2.4 GHz 1/6/11 are fine), but I set the power levels. I also have one AP where I have specifically disabled the 2.4 GHz radio (thank you HPE/Aruba for recently adding this capability after I requested it) because the 2.4 GHz signal interferes with other APs in range, but the 5 GHz signal does it.

Increasing the channel width is the opposite change that you should make because it increases the likelihood of collisions in busy radio environments. I am using 20 MHz default for 2.4 GHz and 20/40 MHz non-default for 5 GHz. I don't know if I still need this for 5 GHz but everything is working great so it's not on my list of things that I need to mess with right now.

I hope these suggestions help. I doubt that you have a bad AIO AP.