NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.

Forum Discussion

mark0077's avatar
mark0077
Tutor
Jan 01, 2023

Disabling 802.11e APSD (WiFi power saving)

Hi all,
I have received a new RBR750 with two satellites in our home. We have about 60 smart lights and led strips from lifx. They are being controlled via a local homeassistant server on the lan.

I have been troubleshooting an issue where the led strips will randomly but frequently drop off the network and appear temporarily 'unavailable' in homeassistant.

The author of the lifx integration has given some great general networking tips to make the connectivity towards these strips more stable, which he has performed on his ubuquiti setup and no longer has issues.

One was disabling wmm/airtime fairness, which I have done on the admin UI and saw a significant reduction in connectivity issues. However every few minutes I still do get many strips still disconnecting.

The next thing he did was disable the WiFi power saving feature, which these strips seem to request/make use of, which then allows them to into a sleep mode. I guess this only works if the network/router supports it. I want to disable this on my orbi network, even if it means telnetting into the router.

Can anyone help with the commands to run to switch this feature off.

Ie this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11e-2005#Automatic_power_save_delivery

I think to make a reliable smart home with lots of IoT devices, work reliably, we need ways to switch these off, either globally or on a per device basis.

Regards,
Mark

4 Replies

  • FURRYe38's avatar
    FURRYe38
    Guru
    Jan 02, 2023

    What Firmware version is currently loaded?

     

    What is the size of your home? Sq Ft?
    What is the distance between the router and 📡 satellite(s)? 30 feet or more is recommended in between RBR and RBS🛰️ to begin with depending upon building materials when wirelessly connected.

     

    Orbi AX doesn't support this UI feature or is telnetting supported on Orbi AX. 

    WMM should be enabled as it helps with performance and speed over wifi. 

     

     

     

    • mark0077's avatar
      mark0077
      Tutor
      Jan 02, 2023
      The firmware version is 4.6.14.3. I have all three orbis, the router and 2 satellite's wired back to a small Netgear switch. The home is 2200sqft, the satellite's are about 30 feet apart.

      Yeah it seems like an increasing number of blogs talk about iot devices not behaving well with wmm, this is definitely the case for these smart bulbs. So thankfully because they connect on 2.4ghz only, my other devices using 5ghz and wmm is enabled there, things work out well. I'm not sure if wmm can be tweaked so as not to disrupt iot devices like it seems to.

      That's a pity there is no way to configure the power saving feature. It may have further increased stability.
  • Mikey94025's avatar
    Mikey94025
    Hero
    Jan 02, 2023
    mark0077 wrote:
    Hi all,
    I have received a new RBR750 with two satellites in our home. We have about 60 smart lights and led strips from lifx. They are being controlled via a local homeassistant server on the lan.

    I have been troubleshooting an issue where the led strips will randomly but frequently drop off the network and appear temporarily 'unavailable' in homeassistant.

    Your lights should not be disconnecting repeatedly from your Orbi wireless network (or else the vast majority of Orbi customers would be reporting such issues).  As an experiment, try setting CTS/RTS Threshold to 2347 to maximize compatibility with older wireless devices.

     

    1. Go to the web admin portal at http://orbilogin.com/
    2. Click to the Advanced tab, Advanced left menu, Wireless Settings
    3. Set CTS/RTS Threshold to 2347 for both 2.4hz and 5Ghz networks
    4. Press Apply

    See if that helps.  If problems still persist, next try disabling AX mode for the 2.4Ghz band:

    1. Go to http://orbilogin.com/
    2. Click to the Advanced tab, Setup left menu, Wireless Setup
    3. Uncheck "Enable 2.4G" under the top Enable AX section
    4. Press Apply
  • CrimpOn's avatar
    CrimpOn
    Guru
    Jan 02, 2023
    mark0077 wrote:
    The next thing he did was disable the WiFi power saving feature, which these strips seem to request/make use of, which then allows them to into a sleep mode. I guess this only works if the network/router supports it. I want to disable this on my orbi network, even if it means telnetting into the router.

    It seems "a bit much" to think that a WiFi feature that became officially part of the standard in 2007 would be the cause of IoT devices not working correctly in 2022. (plus two days).

     

    The reasoning seems exactly backward:

    • Device wants to use power saving feature.
    • Router supports power saving feature.
    • Solution is to turn the feature off on the router.

    As far as I am aware, Netgear has not published anything specific on the topic of power saving.  There is this article about WMM

    https://kb.netgear.com/221/WMM-WiFi-Multimedia which has a puzzling statement:

    What this sounds like is WMM is the "key", and the user gets to choose between performance of multi-media and not having disconnects "under certain conditions."  These days, WMM performance might be significant issue for the 5G band, but not the 2.4G band.

     

    Aside from enable/disable WMM, there is no option to tinker with individual components of Power Save Certification.