So i want to open a conversation regarding something i am seeing probably once a week during my day to day life at work.
I am a telecoms engineer with quite a few years experience so im not just preaching on about a non issue here, this is something i am coming across as faults more and more regularly.
Predominantly i work copper vdsl service but also gpon fttp. This issue is to do with hardware after the connection, most notably isp provided ‘hubs’ (modem, router, switch, access point) though.
Firstly lets talk about my own set up at home and my findings having had this issue myself.
I have a copper service 75/20 and thats the best available to me currently. A stand alone vdsl modem, a Mikrotik rb2011uias-rm 10 port router switch with poe and a touchscreen. i have 6 wired ethernet ports and a mikrotik cap-ac access point centrally mounted in the roof of my apartment.
My wired devices are my desktop pc in my study, a chromecast with google tv in my bedroom serving the tv, a sony x90j tv in the living room and the access point as its poe.
I have 2.4ghz band completely disabled as the 5ghz coverage is great from the mikrotik unit. That and the SSID/PW are the only things configured in the access point o/s. All the routing, switching etc is configured in the rb2011 o/s. I am no network engineer ie i am not a whiz at setting up enterprise gear so my config in the routerboard o/s is minimal. all ports able to speak to each other, port 10 poe turned on, port 1 config to wan and internet login details. thats it, other than that i have touched none of the features of the mikrotik o/s as i do not know enough about it all.
wireless devices. I have a Pixel 6, a lenovo p11+ tablet. 2x nest hub 2nd gen, 2x nest mini, nest audio and a lenovo alarm clock.
The big thing for me is i like the cohesion of everything on one o/s. So my sony tv is a Google tv, i have the google tv in the bedroom, a google phone and google smart devices. Only my desktop pc runs anything else.
Please note the previous is just my opinion on IOT devices and to be clear about what i have and how its set up. I see lots of homes with apple devices mixed with samsung or lg tv’s and amazon IOT devices. I just prefer to have it all joined together under one roof rather than many.
So the issue. And it can be on any speed connection is with turning off.
I am seeing it regularly for work and its happened to me in a repeatable manner so i kinda know whats going on.
Basically i set up a speaker group in the Google home app. i add my 2 nest hubs, 2 nest minis and my nest audio plus my alarm clock.
i say play music. it plays a track or maybe a few on good days then boom. Wifi crashes. wired devices all fine but i have to restart my access point. Set it going again and same thing, crash.
The issue i believe is Mimo. My access point is 2x2 5ghz and 2x2 2.4ghz. I only use 5ghz plus if i connect some of my wireless devices to 2.4ghz and some to 5ghz they think they are on separate wireless networks and report as such, cant sync them up like that.
i started pulling devices out of the homegroup so 5 was better but still crashed wifi, 4 its solid as a rock, never misses a beat.
I attended a house today which had 6 sonos devices, 3 apple tv’s, apple laptops and phones plus 1 main and 3 slave sky tv boxes. Normal family sized 4 bed home, detached so no problems with overcrowded channels.
The house has alot of cat5 cabling. some of it is used but the customer in my opinion under values and under utilises what is there.
His reason for this is the Sky tv engineers seem to think wifi is better than cabled connections and he seems to go around in circles.
These sky tv boxes are odd too. i dont fully understand them but hewres how they work. Main tv box has multiple connections to the exterior dish so it is able to veiw 1 and record several at once. It also connects to the ‘hub’ either wired or wireless and the isp is also sky so the hub matches the tv boxes.
the mini tv boxes are slaves to the main box, they connect wirelessly together to enable live tv but on a band/channel which cannot be seen by wifi analyser apps. They also spit out wifi like a wifi booster on the same ssid/pw as the hub automagically.
Daft thing is the main box and all 3 mini boxes have ethernet cables. So why do sky recommend wifi? i realise there must be some switching going on in the main tv box but surely going wired is better and passing through the hub should be no more an issue than any other kind of lan?
So at this property the same thing is happening. the 4 tv boxes crash the wifi and it doesnt self restart it just sits dormant.
Seen it every week now since November.
Houses with too many wireless devices running at once basically crashing Mimo access points. I expected my own set up to be more robust but its not.
So @wendell how about a series recreating this kind of issue and finding me an access point with like 10x10 mimo for good money.
Maybe tell me if going mikrotik instead of ubiquity was a bad idea? maybe prove that ruckus is where its at or that my own issues lie in my lack of knowledge of the powerful o/s and that i can do some tweaks.