I have three rugged APs managed by my Balance One in a setup that has been stable for several years now. (Older three-antenna APO-RUG model with “regular” ethernet ports.)
All three APs only offer 802.11n connections and below (according to NetSpot). Throughput tops out a tiny bit over 200 megabits/s on 5GHz connections. Wired connections to the Balance One run at over 350 megabits/s.
Spec sheets says that these APs should do 802.11ac. I think I remember them doing so in the past, but I can’t find any setting(s) in the Balance One’s AP management that might enable or disable it.
Questions
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Is the spec sheet correct, these APs do offer AC?
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Assuming yes to #1, why might all three only be offering N?
Hi Will,
tested old APO-RUG model and it shows 11ac for 5GHz as it should. See screenshot below. If you still have issues then I suppose need to dig deeper and for this it would be best to create a support ticket.
My test setup was very basic:
- AP One rugged conencted to B20X
- AP had default configuration (reset to factory defaults and then change Password and SSID only)
FW version: 3.6.0s7 build 1829
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Hello Giedrius,
I think I will put in a ticket. The APO-RUG when not under management advertised 802.11ac connections. Here’s what I’ll put in it
(EDIT - Ticket # is 23010920 )
I did a little testing. I factory reset one of my APO-RUG access points and when it came back up it was advertising 802.11ac for 5GHz. My PC connected to it as ac and finally showed a connection speed above 300/300. (in the 800/700 range)
I turned off AP controller management on that APO-RUG, set the SSID to parallel one of the 4 SSIDs that are broadcast by my two APO-RUG aps that were still being managed by the Balance ONE.
The un-managed AP continued to advertise ac while pulling an ip address from the Balance ONE and on the same LAN.
I then once again allowed the Balance ONE to manage the test APO-RUG and the test APO-RUG went back to only advertising 802.11n. I reduced the SSID count on the test APO-RUG while under test by applied the Default AP profile from the Balance ONE and it continued to only advertise 802.11n.
Other datapoints
- After the above testing I turned on MESH (all the three APO-RUGs are hardwired), hooked an older AP One AC Mini up wired to provision it, and then removed it to see if it would mesh. It did mesh, and I read on peplink.com that meshing is only available on 802.11ac and above, so I took that as a sign that the APO-RUG can do AC.
- I have the three APO-RUGs in a small-ish older house that has lathe-and-plaster construction, one AP per floor. They are all on unique channels that do not overlap each other. Is there some benefit to them falling back to “n” when there a enough APs for a space?
Balance One firmware is 8.2.1 build 5372
APO RUGs’ firmware is 3.6.3 build 1952
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Hello Will,
it could be a bug, but we will need to double check. Also thank you for creating a ticket 
Could you also please attached configs from Balance One and APO-RUG for the setup when the issue happens. This is just to make sure we can recreate the identical test setup in out lab.
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Solution was to download a custom patched firmware. With the new firmware running on the Balance One all three of APO-RUGs now offering 802.11ac connections.
No change was required for the APO-RUGs. The bug was in the AP controller of the Balance One telling the APs to only offer 802.11N.
I’m not sure if the firmware is available to other users, I’ll leave it up to the folks from Peplink to offer that download to other users.
Thank you to all the folks at Peplink who contributed to solving my problem!
Hi there,
as tested in our lab and confirmed by William, the issues was fixed by upgrading to 8.3.0 RC4.
Thus, if anyone is experiencing same issues, you may try 8.3.0 RC FW version or wait for a few weeks and in February we should have the 8.3.0 GA finally released.
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