Incontrol AP management - missing settings?

Hi,
I like the look and feel of IC2 and was hoping to manage a couple Enterprise One AP’s through it. However, I went to turn on band steering, but I do not see an option for it in IC2! After enabling the AP controller, I see quite a few settings that don’t appear to be on IC2, and aren’t accessible on the controller when IC2 control is enabled.

Is it true that some very useful features are disabled when managing through IC2? This seems like a very significant problem, since it makes IC2 useless to power users.

Please let me know if I’m wrong or if there is an update coming in the NEAR future that will fix this issue.

Thank you!

We are glad you like the look and feel of IC2.

In order to simplify the UI, we did not add the band steering option and we picked the “Prefer 5G” for our users. It is because most people would choose it too in most cases. Do you think “Prefer 5G” fits in your situation?

Please just let us know if you find any missing settings that you really need to configure on IC2. We will follow up accordingly.

Thanks for your comment.

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Thank you for the reply, Michael. Yes, I think that Prefer will work fine for my situation. I’m glad to hear that it is enabled by default for IC2.

Is there any documentation regarding the list of settings enabled/disabled by default for IC2 users?

Thank you!

Sorry, we don’t . But it is just one of a few settings that we picked a value for users. In most cases, IC2 does not make changes to settings that are not shown on IC2 UI.

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Hi, Prefer does not seem to be working, APs/clients are not respecting the setting, how can we enable Force via IC2? i have 134 APs that need cofiguring and since enabling incontrol disables advanced settings in the unit the only way to do this is trough incontrol.

Manually configuring 134 aps is not an option

Can it be done maybe using the Settings->Bulk Configurator? what would be the command?

Thanks in advance

My laptop managed to connect to 5GHz that broadcasts by AP One Enterprise. Please find my screenshot below:


Can you provide the similar screenshots in order for me to understand better of your configuration in InControl2 and the connection status of the Wifi client? Which AP you are using now?

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Sure, but its not just one machine its a whole bunch of them on many locations with all 3 APs, (Mini, Enterprise & Rugged)

Ok heres the main issue:

If i set radios like this:

5Ghz will work fine, and band steering works, but theres a big problem, 5Ghz signal may drop to a point where its unusable and still not switch bands, for example, when i set it like this what happens is certain clients will connect to an AP at 5Ghz, and stay connected even with really bad signal but still working (85+ db, 75% packet loss) and even tho theres a 2.4 band available with better signal they will not switch, causing intermittent/unusable service to those clients.

So to mitigate this i change the settings to this:

Now here is the problem, with these settings basically all clients are dumped down to 2.4Ghz and barely any connect to 5ghz, ive tested many of the settings but none seem to make any difference, if i set the limit to on, basically to any power level no matter which, they all drop to 2.4Ghz.

The reason i wanted the enforce option was to force them to 5ghz if they were within acceptable range (because if not the AP would drop them and force them down to 2.4Ghz)

If the threshold would work properly it would be perfect but it doesn’t, its either almost all clients on 5 or almost all on 2.4. no middle ground

I’ve had this problem for a number of years now on many different customer setups and its been an annoying pain, to workaround it, i’ve had to move APs to avoid “hell” zones where the 5g would stick and never swap but also not work.

This is the first time i cannot fix it by physically moving the units around, i’ve placed APs nearly everywhere but the clients sometimes connect to one with bad signal and i get constant complaints about bad network performance, and if i swap em to 2.4g (which i’ve done on other setups with less clients) the load is so high the network collapses, so 2.4 is not an option.

Im not sure what to do, i tried removing the unit from incontrol and using it manually with the force option, it seems to do what I expect it to do, but i couldn’t test it further because i would have to remove and reprogram 5 units for an effective real life test.

Incontrol ID is X2G2Bd if you want to take a look a it.

PS: please allow incontrol settings changing on the unit for APs like you do on the switches, on a switch if you change any setting on the actual Switch UI the change gets uploaded into incontrol, and all settings are visible (not disabled) when connected to incontrol. this would allow us to play with custom radio settings when we run into trouble spots we need to change things to fix that otherwise we cant touch

@Alvaro_Cortes, look like you are facing inconsistent Wifi connection issue. Wifi client does not roam to the nearest AP that with stronger signal strength even the current connection is bad. Normally, this is caused by the APs are too close or the signal strength is too strong. Fyi, Wifi roaming is the client decision, not AP. If you have a chance to check on the client Wifi NIC, you will see the setting below:

Fyi, Band Steering and Min. Client Signal Strength will take effect only when the Wifi client initials the request to connect to the AP. Hence, these settings will not help for Wifi roaming.

I notice all your APs are running old firmware. I suggest upgrading to the latest firmware version to confirm this helps.

Edited on 10-7-2019:
New build 3.6.0s18
https://download.peplink.com/firmware/apone/fw-ap-acmini_enterprise_flexhw2_rugged-3.6.0s18-build1848.bin

Hi,

Yes i know modifying the settings on the client side will fix it, the problem is we do not control all of the computers that connect to our APs, any solution involing modifying the machines on the client side is not an option. i understand this is less than ideal conditions but life is what it is, we have to find an acceptable solution or compromise by only modifying the APs, and that’s where the problem is.

Normally i can modify radio settings on each AP individually to fix these odd issues here and there when we come into them but since the pages on them are blanked out and unable to be modified while incontrolled it sort of ties my hands as to how many modifications i can do to the configurations, which is why i suggested treating APs in incontrol like you treat the SD-Switches, you manage them in incontrol, but you can also log into each one individually and change all the internal settings, incontrol keeps backups of each device’s individual config and restores them in case of failure/factory reset, something like that would be amazing

Now back to the question, i did notice you guys have a new firmware, im rolling it out immediately and starting tests, it fixes the low throughput issue we had with 3.6.0

Ill upgrade all the APs in the office first, then roll it out to all our customers and let you know what feedback we get,i believe this new firmware should get very positive results.

Thanks for taking the time to look into this, it has been a mayor headache to us for quite some time.