After years of trial and error with Pepwave, Meraki, Ruckes, Areohive I can honestly say quite a few things. The only reason I am saying this is because when Peplink came out with the AC One Mini we hopped on it like you wouldn’t believe. While I am and always will be a Peplink/Pepwave preacher and seller I can say this:
We had so many weird issues on all types of firmware with the AP AC One Mini for a long time. Whether it came to range , drops, overheating, etc.
Again after years of experience and trial and error I can confidently say the Pepwave AP One Rugged, AP One Enterprise, and AP One Flex are the only AP’s we sell as they continue to perform and are so easy to manage via controller locally on Balance Firewall or in InControl2 (I prefer local).
When we dumped the AP One AC Mini all of our problems went away. I want to stress literally the only access points we use are Pepwave AP One Rugged, Enterprise, and Flex. In environment where we need Layer 3 roaming we go Meraki, which I hope someday Peplink can deliver for still relatively low price but that’s it!
In Conclusion, sometimes you have to just move on, find something different, test, analyze, determine, and then deploy. This is what we have done by migrating from AC One Mini to strictly Rugged, Enterprise, and Flex.
PS: I do not get paid by Peplink, Peplink saves my business money on support time and cost by just being reliable.
@Scout, the problem is related to the wireless driver. We changed the driver and got a big improvement. Unfortunately, no workaround at the moment since this is related to the driver. Engineering team is trying hard to revamp the system now.
I have done the same thing. I got my Amplifi Wifi Mesh system yesterday. It is a “dumbed down” wifi solution for sure. The only configurable items are the wifi SSID name and password. I went with this solution because it should work in conjunction with the AP One Mini AC once they become more reliable. Supposedly, it can add the mesh to third party wireless. I imagine it is using WDS in the background, but I haven’t had any issues of “packets going to a black hole”. When the new firmware for the AP One Mini AC comes out, I will get my three access points out and see where they fit in my network.
I’ve replaced all the AP One AC Mini devices with another vendor, and find them much easier to maintain and much more reliable. They also seem to do a much better job with weak/distant clients.
My 3 MAX routers are all falling out of warranty and this whole experience convinced me not to renew the warranty on any of them.
I wish everyone the best of luck with hanging in there to get your devices to work as advertised. I’ll be selling mine soon.
This is Eddy from engineering team and we definitely are aware on this. The issues that we have received:
Wireless devices (likely Apple devices) being stuck as not passing traffic
(Please help to tell us what other issues you are seeing)
We are going to release a beta build near end of this week. The beta build will have the fixes on improving the stability for Apple devices and tested. However, there are some functionalities may have affected by this update and we are checking on what else got affected.
When we release the beta build here, we would state what are missing to minimize the confusion. Please stay tuned and our goal here is to resolve the issue you are seeing. This is probably not going to be one shot resolution but we are determined to get this right.
I was planning on buying two of these this evening to be used with a Balance Core I just purchased, but I suppose I will hold off until you folks report back. Thanks for the info.
AP One AC firmware 3.6.0 Beta 1 is out with fix on Wi-Fi client data traffic stuck issue and you can download the firmware for AP One AC Mini / Enterprise / Rugged here. The update have gone through quite a lot changes and we have found these functionalities broken and listed them out below:
SSID Fixed Data Rate
SSID Multicast Filter / Rate / IGMP
SSID local DHCP
SSID Layer2 isolation / Guest Protect
SSID Schedule On / Off
SSID Captive Portal
WDS Connection
We shall continue our development and resolve above broken functionalities. Currently we would need your help to feedback to us about this update. Your helps are really appreciated.
Installed the 3.6.0 Beta 1. Complete mess… Had to revert.
SSID’s were not broadcasting on proper frequencies. Clients could not connect. My balance one showed only 4 of my 26ish clients connected. I’d love to test but it has to be a better product than this. Had to revert to 3.5.4. Happy to try again when this is a bit more baked out.
Appreciated on the help and sorry for the mess. I do have a Balance One AP Controller environment and have found out the 2.4G SSID isn’t broadcasting. Please tell us what frequencies you seeing issue. My 5G is running on ch36 and 5 Apple devices connected at this moment showing on both AP and AP Controller side.
We run more testing and certainly look into the broadcast issue.
Hello @Eddy_Yeung,
When will these firmware versions be available for testing from within InControl2 under the “Show Beta Firmware” as the beta options do not currently show as available?
Also will it be possible to roll back from within InControl2 to the previous version if we do apply a beta version or later version for the WAP?
Appreciate your assistance,
Marcus
Currently we don’t offer this Beta since this is still a bit early. The effort focusing on resolving the client connection stability improvement as well as addressing client traffic stuck. That effort actually breaks a few parts and that’s why we have stated some of the features are incomplete
We are working on those features; when we have completed those missing features, we could release onto InControl2.
That’s why your helps would be really appreciated on sites that’s having the reported issue.
Running 3.6.0 Beta 2 for the past 2 weeks. So far I have not seen any examples of the original client problem. I am just starting to run this in locations that are more problematic so I’m not making any judgements on if this is an actual fix yet.
However, I do see two possible side effects:
Reported Tx to client data rates show 6Mb/sec for all 5GHz clients. I believe this is just a reporting issue, because I measure great throughput on devices showing this rate.
Clients seem to favor 2.4GHz channels, even though the settings are to favor 5GHz. No concrete data here, I just notice many of my laptop and smartphones seem to be using 2.4GHz in locations that are typically a great 5GHz connection. I have tried re-establishing a few times in a fixed location and still just connect on 2.4.
Ran beta 2 for a couple weeks. I did have at least one incident where I once again needed to reconnect to the AP to restore connectivity, however overall the connectivity issue is much better. I will try beta 4 now.
I hope all the issues are resolved and a final release soon - my restaurant business runs on a Peplink AP with 3.5.4 and it has caused some issues there too. It should not need to be said that this connectivity issue is not acceptable, particularly in a business environment. That said, thank you for working on this, I know you guys are trying to fix it.
Socal, really appreciated your beta 2 result and we should be heading to the right direction. You are right that we definitely want to nail the connectivity issue down to release the final.
Happy to try again when this is a bit more baked out.