Intermittent Wifi Issues - Phones Specifically

Hardware Hub Networking
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Need to get some insight on the issue I’m having. It seems to be affecting primarily my phone, my mom’s phone and tablet.

The symptom my mom and I are is a bit hard to explain…but the jist of it nothing wants to load yet alone connect or take a very long time, despite having full wifi strength; but when I’m trying to browse the internet or in an app…I’ll see the 4G icon appear on my phone even when my phone has full Wifi signal. But everything else that runs on Wifi works as it should; but I do sometimes notice my Dell Precision 7720 has a limited connection on wifi periodically though that’s likely a separate issue.

Some of the gear I have on my network is as follows, 1x Ubiquiti Unifi AC Pro and 1x AC Lite, 1X Brocade ICX6620 series 48 port PoE switch, Phonetone Cell Phone Booster P20 series, had since November of 2020, well before 5G became available in my area? (which I’m thinking might be the issue) and my router is running PFSense and FRX523 ONT Box from Frontier.

Device wise, My Mom has a Blu G90 Pro and Samsung Galaxy Tab 8; which I unlocked to use on MetroPCS and my phone I’m running is a Ulefone Armor 24 (AKA The Two Pound Brick)

Software wise, all phones and tablet are on their latest verison of Android. Running the Unifi controller software on TrueNAS

When I’m tinkering in the Unifi controller, I do notice I’m getting a good amount of interference on the 5Ghz band for TX Retry/Dropped. So whatever is causing the interference on the 5Ghz band might be what’s causing the issue I’m having with the cell phones as well. They all report on the Unifi controller using the 5Ghz band.

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You probably have multiple issues and it’s very likely not 5G (cell network) related.

Your Ubiquiti Unifi AC Pro uses, Qualcomm Atheros QCA9563 SoC (MIPS) and QCA9880 + QCA9563 radios. While everything is EoL by now you’re still on “first gen” 11ac hardware which wasn’t great to be honest in terms of stability and reliability. It “works” but depending on hardware drop outs can be common and the AP itself (well, the radio part) doesn’t necessarily work well with devices with aggressive power management such as tablets, phones and other handheld devices. The AC Lite is pretty much the same story as it’s based on pretty much the same hardware.

As for wireless devices, many have downright poor implementations and/or broken hardware/software support from the start.

If possible I would also recommend in general sticking to Qualcomm when it comes to handheld devices as they in general “work best” in most environments given that the manufacturer have implemented antennas decently, provides somewhat recent wifi drivers and keep these updates with later firmwares.

Regarding hardware design sticking to the major brands is in general a safe bet, “domestic” chinese brands in many cases cuts corners to keep cost down and that also includes aftermarket (software/driver support). For “reliable” wireless networking in general I’ve found Intel (avoid first gen/wave hardware) 11ax (capable), Qualcomm (handheld devices) (695 and newer SoCs), some Mediatek devices (Amazon Fire HD Tablet 10th gen and newer) some Samsung Exynos devices (mainly recent Google based ones) to work well. Unisoc, Realtek and older Mediatek are terrible in my experience, Broadcom in general is a mixed bag at best and mobile devices that uses Marvell doesn’t necessarily play nice with APs. Handheld devices also have shorter range than lets say laptops and tablets in general due to design and power constraints and are usually quite agressive about it.

As for your hardware I’m going to guess that it doesn’t help your cause either but based on my experience,

BLU G90 Pro seems to use a fairly old Mediatek chipset and is very likely no longer updated, apart from the security concerns it would probably help moving to something more recent.
Moto G84 (soon EoL)/G85 might be worth taking a look at as replacement without breaking the bank and if your carrier allows you to. They seem reliable in general and performs decent, no powerhouses by any means though.

The tablet is probably either A8 or S8(?), if it’s A8 it uses a Unisoc SoC so your milage may vary and I wouldn’t have high hopes of it being stable. The S8 should be fine however.

Ulefone Armor 24 also uses an older Mediatek SoC, might work good in general given it seems to have a fairly recent version of Android but I don’t “trust” the “smaller” Chinese cell brands so milage is unknown.

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My Mom’s tablet is an A8 I think. It’s been a while since I last used it as I replaced it with a Dell Venue Pro 11.

So assuming it would be with the AP itself; the drops have been a constant the past couple of days on the AC Pro I have; I did buy it used last year prior to switching to Frontier. After the install though; periodically I would notice the issue experienced only last momentarily,…however it’s been doing it a LOT more often. Even after restarting the AP in the Unifi controller, still getting the same result.

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I guess you could try to replace one of the APs and see if things improve although I do suspect it’s also the devices themselves that aren’t playing nice. That being said, one possible option if you want to try something cheap is to get a Cudy WR3000 (these are dirt cheap), flash it with OpenWrt (snapshot, read the wikipage first at least) and use it as a dumb AP. I have one here and it seem to do fine for what it is and it won’t break your bank. In worst case you have backup router/wireless bridge. There are “better” alternatives too but it’s cheap. Supported Mercusys hardware (go for Mediatek Filogic based ones) also offers a good bang for the buck otherwise but tends to be more expensive.

…or get newer Unifi hardware and hope for the best but that’s likely more expensive.

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I’m honestly thinking about dumping Ubiquti to be honest. Trying to find an alternative to where I don’t need any licensing bullshit just to use the APs for a home network.

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6

Have you tried running the radio channel optimization utility in UniFi? I had a similar issue with my in-laws and it was because all their neighbors were drowning out the spectrum and causing a ton of interference. As soon as I ran the channel optimizer it stopped all their issues.

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I’ll give it a run and report back. Just need to find the channel optimization utility in the Unifi controller first.

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Settings>WiFi>Optimize Channelization

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9

Thank you, I’ll try that when I get home from work.

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You don’t need any license for Unifi.
You can run it with a local controller or even just with the app.

I get where you are coming from, but I can tell you since I moved away from Unifi (reason for that was what @diizzy described, the Unifi AC Pro series was notoriously unstable) and tested AVM, Aruba instantOn, Cisco, Meraki, Asus, Netgear, I can tell you that all suck. Some more (AVM does not play nice with Apple, Asus Mesh is a PITA, Netgear has kernel errors as soon as you use anything else than the defaults) some less, but they all have their quirks.

I am now back to Unifi and pretty happy with my Unifi U7 Pro. Far from perfect (I don’t need the 6GHz control just because Android is to stupid) but still pretty good.

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What’s your take on the TP Link Omada?

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I only used it for one festival, so my knowledge is rather limited.

Controller seemed fine, deployment was easy.

2,4Ghz Wifi was bad, but I am pretty sure that was not TPs fault but the POS systems we used, which basically were shitty old Android 8 phones with a card reader.

For home users, I would recommend this read. Helps troubleshooting issues.

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You do realise that most of what you’ve listed boils down to software/firmware related issues as you don’t have that many SoC/radio vendors to choose from?

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Yep. Firmware/software is by far the biggest source of errors.

Like for example, all of a sudden Aruba InstantOn was unable to stream via Surface Wireless Display adapters and it took them 9 months to fix it.

I was disappointed that it took a “pro” company so long. That is why I think you are probably better off with something that a lot of people use and you can track down the issue with other forum members, so you know you are not insane. Compare the number of users of the Unifi community against the instantOn community.