I could use some help trying to troubleshoot a problem I’ve been having with the 5 GHz WiFi and client disconnects. I had opened a ticket about this problem and after several months of back and forth and remote assistance I was able to get a replacement unit that is showing the same problem.
Client devices that connect with 5 GHz will become disassociated and unable to reconnect for intermittent periods. When using the WiFi as WAN the 2.4 GHz band works solid but the 5 GHz band shows the intermittent drop outs/disconnects in the Latency graph on WAN Quality Status page even though the RSSI is steady at around -48 dBm.
The MAX is in an RV currently about 12’ away from the AP it’s connected to and in the attached screenshot I have the Health Check pinging the AP and the MAX is the only client.
Curious where you get here. When I first got my max br pro 5g (early unit) I had lots of issues with getting wifi wan to work on 5g. Not sure I ever got to bottom of it. My main use case/test was connecting into my own home wifi. Here are a few things to share
I do think they got this sorted but it’s worth noting with the max br1 pro 5g there were many challenges on their wifi stack. They did a lot of fixes early on which may have cleared all these up. I’m not saying these are still open bugs but rather offering ideas to consider.
My home WiFi (Omada) has a mix of 2.4 and 5 g on same ssid. Pep team did a few releases that helped address this but generally speaking the unit had challenges when both of the wifi as wan for 2.4 and 5 were connecting to same sid. Some of the strangeness was that both wifi as wan would connect but would see issues with no traffic routing at random occurrences. Sometimes disabling the 2nd wifi (either 2.4 or 5g) as wan worked sometimes it didn’t. Both interfaces would get a DHCP from home wifi fine at same time. Never got to bottom of it to know if the issue was about same target ssid for both wifi as wan or routing in the peplink. In end I created a ssid just for the pep on only 2.4g.
My home wifi had roaming enabled. Again earlier versions of pep firmware handled this horribly. One of the earlier fixes they did helped address this but prior to that I’d see the single wifi as wan client disconnect and roam around the the various APs it could see on same network ignoring the AP 20’ from it which had 5x better signal than the other APs.
Power level for APs - again something which we experienced some strangeness with. For usual trips the power levels on pep lan side AP and on WiFi as WAN we had turned up. I definitely saw more stability on connection to the home WiFi went set to lower power. Suspected interaction with whatever issue was going on for #2 here
Mounting - originally had the max br1 pro 5g mounted against a 1/2 plywood cabinet - it would get very hot. Added 3/4 standoff spacers under it so now bottom has airflow too. Unit still runs very warm but is lot better - not 100% sure but think I’ve seen fewer lockups. (In 2 years I’ve had the pep local AP completely disappear 4 times - requiring a yank of power to restart - all times when unit was very hot - making me think looped wifi stack but who knows …)
Q1: What firmware are you on ?
Q2: Have you tried to track a WiFi client connecting to you pep 5G AP to see it has drop outs at the same time as your 5g wifi as wan ? I have a few 5g only clients connecting to pep AP and on regular occasion they drop and reconnect. The drop and reconnect is very fast but it does happen every 6-24hours. (These same clients do not display this behavior on other networks so it is on pep side.)
Thanks for sharing your experience with your max…it looks to be very close to what I’m seeing. To answer your questions:
Currently using firmware 8.5.2 build 5862. They had sent me a newer version which didn’t help on the old max but haven’t tried it on this replacement.
I have not tried to track the clients to the drop outs with the WiFi as WAN but based on what I’ve seen with the frequency of the client disconnects they probably do match up. These dropouts are much more frequent from what you describe with disconnects on mine happening every few minutes with random periods of time between the dropouts.
At this point since the 5GHz band is all but useless, I’m only using 2.4GHz.
