Internet issues in W2D

[mitar]

The internet connection in my room has not been working very well lately. On my laptop it says that I'm connected but I wasn't even able to send you an email. I had to use my phone. Could you check it out? My room is W2D and if I'm not here it's fine, you can go in.

[mitar]

One more report, maybe related:

It’s Sage in W1A. Recently I have been experiencing very slow internet in my room. I did a speed test and it was under 1 Mb/s. When I walked out into the C1 and did another speed test, it jumped up to 20 Mb/s! Usually it is a little bit slower than the rest of the house but tonight is the first time it has been this slow. There have also been times when I get dropped from the internet or have a hard tim connecting to the Cloyne network from my room.

[mitar]

I configured on all routers:

For Cisco:

Disabled Data Rates: 1.0, 2.0, 5.5, 11.0, others set to "enable" Default Radio Channel: Least Congested Frequency Least Congested Channel Search: 1, 6, 11 Max. Data Retries: 128 RTS Max. Retries: 128

For DD-WRT: Wireless Network Mode: NG-Mixed Wirelss Channel: 1, 6, or 11

The idea is that all routers should be on 1, 6, or 11 channels, with neighboring routers not on the same channel. Also slow speeds should be disabled, so that clients do not use too much of airtime. If they cannot connect, it is better to put another AP near them and not that they lower the performance for everyone.

But I am not sure how you do that on DD-Wrt and OpenWrt. So how you disable slower bitrates?

[mitar]

In fact on Cisco I had to set 6 Mbit to required, and higher to enable, otherwise all higher were set to required. It seems that at least one has to be required.

[ahdinosaur]

some rooms are far away from the nearest WAP, hence the slow speeds. my solution was to continually add new WAPs to get better coverage, in some cases giving people WAPs to put in their rooms like W1A (assuming that's the room on the far side opposite the study room).

[mitar]

There is no study room anymore there. Now Graham lives there.

The better solution is to simply prevent low bitrates to be even available to clients. Then they have or good speeds or no connectivity. And then you discover those and give them a closer AP. Otherwise they consume airtime for everyone (low bitrate = more airtime necessary to communicate) and everyone's network connectivity goes slower.

[mitar]

Also, you have to make sure you are using only channels 1, 6, and 11, because those are the only 20 MHz channels which do not interfere between each other.

[ahdinosaur]

that makes sense, although not sure if that would have been possible when i started as network manager with how many people might have had no connectivity. agreed about channels.

[timothyquach]

Jalissa says she has problem connecting on W3I

[mitar]

And Graham on W1H.

[mitar]

Graham (W1H) is Sage (W1A) are reporting that it works slow for them. Others seems to have it good now.

[mitar]

Issues reported in W3G as well. 5 days ago.

[mitar]

So while testing Internet connectivity in W3K I discovered that one of possible reasons for issues with WiFi is that people have preference set so that it tries them to connect to AirBears first, and on west wing there are signal from AirBears. Changing the preference/priority might fix the problem for them.

I also changed the channel on to W2H which seemed least crowded (I don't know why it was not picked automatically).

I also discovered that our changes of disabling low bitrates were not effect.

I also discovered a broken AP from ages ago in closet at the beginning of W3. Maybe that's the reason why people have problems with WiFi there. It seems to be broken even before the summer.

[mitar]

I went over Cisco APs and for some reason many of them hat low bitrates enabled again.

[mitar]

Closing this for now. I made major network upgrades and let's start collecting new reports.

We have now Cisco routers which are configured so that bitrates under 6 Mbps are not allowed. Additionally, power is reduced to 17 dBm. I configured the same on TP-Link WR1043ND v2 with OpenWrt by installing OpenWrt image and then:

In /etc/config/system configured hostname.

Disabled DHCP:

uci set dhcp.lan.ignore=1
uci set dhcp.lan.dhcpv6=disabled
uci set dhcp.lan.ra=disabled
uci commit dhcp

/etc/init.d/dnsmasq disable

Disabled firewall:

/etc/init.d/firewall disable

In /etc/config/network I removed all WAN sections and configured LAN:

config interface 'lan'
    option ifname 'eth0 eth1'
    option force_link '1'
    option type 'bridge'
    option proto 'static'
    option ipaddr '192.168.0.XXX'
    option netmask '255.255.0.0'
    option ip6assign '60'   

For v1 I instead of listing multiple interfaces for ifname I configured option ifname 'eth0.1' and:

config switch_vlan
    option device 'switch0'
    option vlan '1'
    option ports '0 1 2 3 4 5t'

In /etc/config/wireless configured:

config wifi-device  radio0
    option type     mac80211
    option channel  11
    option hwmode   11g
    option path     'platform/qca955x_wmac'
    option htmode   HT20
    option require_mode n
    option txpower 17
    #option basic_rate '6000'

config wifi-iface
    option device   radio0
    option network  lan
    option mode     ap
    option ssid     Cloyne
    option encryption 'psk2'
    option key      'XXX'

For v1 it is option path 'platform/ath9k'.

Created /etc/hotplug.d/iface/30-bitrates:

#!/bin/sh

. /lib/functions.sh
. /lib/functions/network.sh

# Disable legacy 2.4GHz low bitrates
if [ ifup = "$ACTION" ]; then
    case "$DEVICE" in
        wlan*)
            logger setting bitrate for device "$DEVICE" on interface "$INTERFACE"
            iw "$DEVICE" set bitrates legacy-2.4 6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54 ht-mcs-2.4 lgi-2.4
        ;;
        br-*)
            # Bridged interface, check if any wifi interface is member
            for i in $(ls /sys/class/net/$DEVICE/brif); do
                case "$i" in
                    wlan*)
                        logger setting bitrate for device "$i" on interface "$INTERFACE"
                        iw "$i" set bitrates legacy-2.4 6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54 ht-mcs-2.4 lgi-2.4
                    ;;
                esac
            done
        ;;
    esac
fi