[SOLVED] Why does my AP behind a wireless bridge suck?

[VariableProfile]

I'm running a TPLink system with 3x EAP 245 v3 and an Omada controller. Two of the APs are connected via ethernet and the other one is in a close-by building connected via a pair of TPLink CPE210. The wifi performance in that secondary building is awful. In my main building I can easily get over 100Mb/s and if I plug a laptop into the CPE210 at the outbuilding I can also get well over 50Mb/s. When I connect to the wifi in the outbuilding it's barely usable and if I run wireshark I see a ton of duplicate packets and TCP retransmits.

The CPE210s report good signal and plugging into them works fine. I also tried another set of bridge devices that didn't seem to improve things. I've set the bridge to channel 1 and the AP to channel 11 (on 2.4GHz).

My router is a EdgeRouter Lite, my laptop is 2013 MacBook Pro, no modem I've got fiber internet. There are 20 clients split among all the APs, only 4 use the outbuilding AP. It's a mix of 2.4 and 5, mostly 2.4.

Does anyone have any ideas for me to try?

 

[Ralston18]

This:

"the other one is in a close-by building connected via a pair of TPLink CPE210."

Outbuilding: How close is "close-by". Does weather make a difference?

What other buildings, structures, trees, etc. are in the area - especially in line of sight....

What about other wireless networks in the area: What frequencies and channels are they using?

 

[VariableProfile]

This:

"the other one is in a close-by building connected via a pair of TPLink CPE210."

Outbuilding: How close is "close-by". Does weather make a difference?

What other buildings, structures, trees, etc. are in the area - especially in line of sight....

What about other wireless networks in the area: What frequencies and channels are they using?

It is ~40' away. No vegetation, only walls in the LOS. It's so close that I just got rid of the bridge and I get better (still not great) results in Mesh mode.

This is in a city with a lot of other wifi signals. What tools do you recommend (on mac) to do a survey? And what would I be looking for in the survey results? (I set them to channels 1 and 11 since they chose those channels on auto and I thought it seemed sensible to lock them there.)

 

[bill001g]

Not sure what is causing your problem but it is likely some interference. Point to point bridge devices should work fairly well at short distance like that and because the beam is narrow it also reduces the chance of interference.

A site survey tends to not show anything real interesting. You will find every channel used by multiple people. It seems everyone has multiple wifi router/repeater/mesh in their house. Many of the so called triband routers will use every available channel just on 1 router.

The recommendations of 1,6,11 on 2.4g is outdated information. Almost every device is now using 40mhz channels. There is only 60mhz total on 2.4g. Where before you could put 3 20mhz signals in the bandwidth it is now impossible to fit 2 40mhz channels without overlap.

What is very strange is you say if you plug into the point to point with ethernet it is kinda ok. This would mean it has to be related to the AP device you are plugging into the point to point. The only real difference is you have extra wifi signal to the pc.

 

[VariableProfile]

Not sure what is causing your problem but it is likely some interference. Point to point bridge devices should work fairly well at short distance like that and because the beam is narrow it also reduces the chance of interference.

A site survey tends to not show anything real interesting. You will find every channel used by multiple people. It seems everyone has multiple wifi router/repeater/mesh in their house. Many of the so called triband routers will use every available channel just on 1 router.

The recommendations of 1,6,11 on 2.4g is outdated information. Almost every device is now using 40mhz channels. There is only 60mhz total on 2.4g. Where before you could put 3 20mhz signals in the bandwidth it is now impossible to fit 2 40mhz channels without overlap.

What is very strange is you say if you plug into the point to point with ethernet it is kinda ok. This would mean it has to be related to the AP device you are plugging into the point to point. The only real difference is you have extra wifi signal to the pc.

Yeah, I find it quite strange myself. I didn't realize that about the 2.4 channel overlap. I can manually set them to use 20MHz width and that should keep them from interfering, right? But using 5GHz on the remote AP should be an even easier way of preventing interference and that didn't help. :\