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Forum Discussion
RS200 speed slows to half after a day or two
I had an Asus router that was having a problem where I'd have to reboot it every week or it would start having up to 40% packet loss. Really weird and annoying, so I replaced it last week with an RS2...
I haven't tested the wired speeds yet since I'm focused on why the wifi speeds get slower after a couple of days and immediately get better after a reboot. The slowness occurs no matter how close I am to the router. I could be standing right next to it and I'd see roughly half the normal speed. Then if I reboot the router, normal speeds return for a day or two. It could be some wireless interference and perhaps a difference in channels being selected after a reboot, but it would be good to figure it out. Using a wifi analyzer while at the device that is furthest from my router, my wifi radio is 20dB hotter than the next most powerful radio.
Is the speed test done in the 5 or 6 Ghz band SSID? What channels are you using in these bands? Try using a manual least congested channel 36-48 or 149-161 with a 80 Mhz bandwidth (speed up to 2.9 Gbps) in the 5 Ghz band.
5 GHz. Because I'm a dummy and didn't pay enough attention, I got the RS200 which is only dual band and doesn't have 6 GHz. My own mistake there and I'm kicking myself for it.
The currently selected mode is "Up to 5.8 GHz". Are you saying I should manually select a channel and then drop that setting down to the "up to 2.9" setting?
Oh yes the RS200 doesn't have the 6 Ghz band, I forgot about it too. It isn't a big deal since the range in 6 Ghz band is very limited. Manually select a non DFS least congested channel 36-48 or 149-161 with speed up to 2.9 Gbps (80 mhz bandwidth), since the 160 Mhz bandwidth isn't ideal with neighboring wifi networks or radar interference. Also most older clients don't support UNII-4 channels 169-177.
Also, I just fired up the Wifi analyzer on my phone and it shows channels 82 and 114 as the best on the 160 MHz channels and then I have a selection of "best" options in the 80 MHz channels: 74, 90, 138, 171, 106, 122. It shows no current access points on channel 82. Does that mean that would be a good choice? I may be a network engineer but I know very little about wireless.
The DFS channels have lower transmit power than non DFS channels and would work great in close range without any radar interference.
I think you just nailed the cause of my problem. I read a little about radar interference with DFS channels yesterday and then I found out how to see what channels my Apple devices are using. After rebooting yesterday, they were all on channel 100 (DFS). For quite a while, even with my Asus router I just replaced, I'd get "Internet access has been restored" messages in Facebook Messenger, indicating that there was an interruption but I never knew the cause. I thought my router was flaky. But it just happened, so I checked and my Mac is now on channel 161 (80 MHz) and my download tests dropped to roughly half. I'm not all that far from Denver International Airport, so I wonder if some radar is kicking my devices off that channel and I end up landing on one that is suboptimal.