Having experienced some low wireless connection speeds and what appeared to be drops in wireless broadcasts, I flashed 2.1.2 about an hour ago on the WNDAP350 I run here at home to cover my second floor and I have one out in the garage. I see the interface has improved a little and that the signal is now more stable and appears faster wireless transfer speeds. The applicationn layer in Windows is reporting a solid 270mps where I could not improve above 135 before with the same settings. I believe the programmers addressed more issues than were stated in the release notes. But, anyway I am encouraged and now will start flashing the six of these I have at work to see if they do better. I have been very careful to separate frequencies, but never could get the performance I expected out of a relatively expensive device.
I flashed 3 of the WNDAP350's at work today and saw as improvement there as well. The other 3 are used for mobile training labs and I will get to these and get some feedback as to their efficiency with around 15 users a piece connected to them with 30 to 45 users connected in one room.
I too have noticed an increase in speed. Its not massive but noticeable. I can't quote numbers unfortunately as I didn't measure before upgrading. I also agree that more was done than the release notes mention; The ability to schedule the radio's on and off at specific times was not mentioned in the release notes, and that to me is a significant new feature.
Looks like this firmware isnt compatable with the WMS5316 Controller (on V2.1.2 FW) although the AP can be discovered it cannot reach 'syncronized' status (unit factory reset to be sure)
Lets hope there is a FW update to the controller so we can take advantage of this.
I have dozens of WNDAP350s sitting in our warehouse because they haven't worked since we purchased them. About a month ago I decided to put two of them in production at my house in an attempt to see if they have gotten any better. Unfortunately, even with the 2.1.2 update I am still seeing extremely unreliable connectivity including packet loss, high latency and total dropouts on the 5Ghz radios. I have reset both units back to factory defaults on a number of occasions, tried every suggestion found in the forums and spent countless hours researching the problems with no solution. Its so sad that Netgear cant get this right and its even worse that we all got screwed in the process.
I have experienced a lot of trouble with those WNDAP350 and the almost working configuration I have is NOT using the WMS5316 (I only have 5of them so the single management isn´t to heavy) and firmware WNDAP350_V2.0.9 and only using the 2.4GHz mode.
I disabled the 5GHz mode when I suspected that the POE-switch couldn´t deliver enough power, but that wasn´t the problem and now 4 of 5 APs are using the power adapter from the box.
I still have problems with the connection just dying for a couple of seconds or more.. but it´s better than previous firmware and perhaps the Netgear engineers have recruited someone from HP/3com or Cisco who could tell them what they should now.. (LOL)
Lets give it a try, although the post from dexterous tells me it might not be worth it, but I will only use 2.4GHz band in my test.
Note: TKIP is mutch faster than AES, I have tested on several APs (WNDAP350 that is)
Bandwith tester is iperf running against 3 servers on 2 different distribuition switches Access switches are 100Mbit HP Procurve switches.
Summary: the following speeds were measured on FW 2.0.9 and are a summary on 5 APs connected to 100Mbit and 1Gigabit HP switches. 3-4Mbit/s using AES 14-18Mbit/s using TKIP
From the tests on FW 2.1.2 I cannot say it is faster than previous firmware.
A test with the firmware 2.1.2 directly attached to the core layer (Gigabit HP Procurve) gave the following resluts. (I also tested it connected to a D-link 100Mbit POE-switch with the same results)
:::::::::::::::::: NEW TEST 2011-12-22 - 16:55:53,06 :::: Location - Connected to CoreSwitch :::::::::::::::::: Testing Server1 from: via MLMAP4 direktkopplad till POE-Switch ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to Server1, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [328] local 192.168.1.132 port 58291 connected with 192.168.1.10 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [328] 0.0-10.0 sec 22.6 MBytes 19.0 Mbits/sec Testing Server2 from: via MLMAP4 direktkopplad till POE-Switch ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to Server2, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [328] local 192.168.1.132 port 58297 connected with 192.168.1.20 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [328] 0.0-10.0 sec 22.3 MBytes 18.7 Mbits/sec Testing Server3 from: via MLMAP4 direktkopplad till POE-Switch ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to Server3, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [328] local 192.168.1.132 port 58298 connected with 192.168.1.30 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [328] 0.0-10.0 sec 22.9 MBytes 19.2 Mbits/sec :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
I will wait for the the users on this AP to complain or not and might do an upgrade in the end of January on the other ones if there is no complaints.
