We have
2 AP one’s (firmware 3.3.10 build 1312) on both
2 officePoint (2.1.6)
all of these run to a cisco smart switch then onto a Peplink Balance 305 (1 dsl line thru at&t - 1 fiber line thru time warner)
all of our hardwired network consistently gets 30mbps coming down 30 going up.
the wifi how ever is 5mbps no matter what I do. I have reset all ap/officepoints to factory default, changed channels , played with settings i know nothing about. I can not seem to get these puppies to pull more than 5 down.
i have 4 in about 1500 square feet. Too many?
our office building has 3 floors, when i open the wifi search on the mac there is 50 different connections from other offices. Are we overloaded?
anyone have any ideas on how i can get this office set up properly?
they are spaced about 20 feet apart, but we have many walls between them
The Wi-Fi is just saturated in your area. You could try using channel 3 or 4 or 8 or 9 but this may not improve it. These models only do 2.4gHz, are your devices capable of a 5gHz connection? If so, I would strongly recommend upgrading to the AP One Enterprise or the AP One Rugged. Thanks.
Too much Apple. If you can get your hands on an Android device, try using WiFi Analyzer to get the lay of the land when it comes to channel usage. That said, it is of limited use in a very congested area because it does not show bandwidth usage by network or by channel, just signal strengths. Or, on a Windows machine, Nirsoft.net has great free software that offers tons of WiFi network details.
You should also benefit using 20MHz wide channels on the 2.4GHz band, they should cause and suffer less interference than wider channels. I agree with Tim that 5Ghz is better yet, but that said, it is not necessarily a problem to share a WiFi channel with someone else. If both of you are not saturating the channel, no big deal, you should not step on each others feet too much. However, I am not familiar with software that shows actual bandwidth usage per channel.
In the absolute worst case, you may need a router or AP that can run in the mid-range 5GHz channels that are normally off limits because they are reserved for radar. Some routers can detect radar and use the channels when there is no radar signal. Only one I know of off the top of my head is the Portal router, but I have read that others can do this too.
Another worst case scenario is to experiment with an AP that is smart enough to detect interference and dynamically switch channels. Question is whether it considers interference a strong signal (even if not doing much transmission of data) or actually sending a lot of data. And, whether it works at all. Still, try 5Ghz first.
I just purchased 2 AP One Rugged’s. I think Tim is right, we are seeing wifi from the nail salon across the street. plus 3 floors of office buildings. In the mean time, we are channel hopping!