Recently got a SOHO Mk3 for use in my RV. Works great so far with my AC791L hotspot, however while traveling I noticed I was getting about 10% packet loss not just to the internet but also just from my laptop to the SOHO.
I have WiFi 5 Ghz wan setup as priority 1 and 2.4 as 2 while the hotspot is 3. At home I have a 5 ghz network the RV connects to when there and some campgrounds have decent 2.4 ghz wifi. So when not around those networks they go into “Scanning” looking of those networks while the hotspot is used.
It seems when WiFi wan is scanning it’s causing the LAN WiFi on that same frequency to constantly lose packets every few seconds. If I move those wan connects to disabled the packet loss go away or if they are actively connected to the WiFi network there is no loss.
Is this a known issue? I imagine its because the single radio is trying to actively scan for networks and during that scan it can’t handle LAN traffic. Unfortunately for a mobile setup like RV or Boat this would be a common occurrence where WiFi wan is desired if available and cellular while moving, but having to manually disable WiFi wan is not ideal.
Here is an example ping plot to the SOHO from my laptop with the laptop connected to 5 Ghz WiFi LAN.
The first half of the plot has 5 Ghz WiFi wan enabled but not connected to network and “scanning” for one. The second half is after disabling 5 Ghz WiFi wan.
Doing some more testing, the health check interval seems to have no effect on the packet loss. I had hope upping the health check from say 5 seconds to minutes would reduce the scan interval but that seems to be a separate interval with no visible setting.
The SOHO has a single Wi-Fi chipset and we Software-Define it to act as both an AP and WAN source. When both are being used at the same time we need to allocate the resources accordingly and this would explain the 10% packet loss you are seeing on the AP side when the WAN side is scanning.
I wouldn’t consider this an issue, but more of a cause-and-affect of using powerful Software-Defined technology in a product with an incredible price point and overall feature set.
If price is not an issue here I would recommend going with a MAX-HD2 or MAX-HD4 as these models have a dedicated Wi-Fi chipset for the WAN and a 2nd dedicated chipset for the AP.
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I realize the limitations of a single radio however the high scan rate seems excessive. That amount of packet loss causes noticeable issues even with just web browsing.
Since it sounds like there is no complete solution to this issue I would like to request the scan rate be lowered to something more reasonable such once a minute rather than once every few seconds. It great that it can detect a wifi network coming back into range within a few seconds, but it does not seem like that is worth 10+% packet loss while its out of range. Even better would a user definable setting for the scan interval so that one could choose how often packets will be dropped based on the application.
Another suggestion would be to tie scan interval to the health check interval, although a separate setting would be ideal, if its easier it would make sense that it follows the health interval setting since its basically a health check.
