Wifi slowing to a halt (netgear switch + unifi hot spots)

[ramblo93]

Hi All,

For the last 1.5 years or so our wifi has been great. We have the BT router under the stairs with a Netgear switch with various hard wired connections, two of which go to Unifi access points (one upstairs and one down). It's been faultless and we used to get 15-25mps wifi upstairs (our max is 35mps according to BT but we're a way away form the nearest fibre cabinet).

Recently the wifi has been slowing to a crawl (e.g. 0.25 mps). It'll be like that for a bit then pop up to 5mps. Up down up down all day. WHen it is bad we are still getting speeds of 7-12mps on a wired connection so the issue is definitly wifi related.

Rebooting everything (switching router & switch off at the mains) seems to resolve it from anything from a few hours to a couple of days before it goes bad again.

Any ideas what it might be or some logical steps to take to try and isolate the issue?

[xeny]

Is your test wired connection from the switch or the router?

Seems odd you'd get 7-12 wired when you normally get 15-25 on WiFi - implies there may be a problem that is disrupting wireless and wired, but wired is coping better.

Which model access points, and are you using the controller, or the app on a phone?

[rxe]

Do you have any wired devices on the network that you can benchmark against? E.g. a NAS or similar that you can use to exclude the internet connection. It’s all about eliminating bits of the network until you find the problem.

I would:

- Disconnect the internet and try Wifi vs wired to a local device - pull a big file from a NAS or similar and see if it is quick.
- from windows or Linux, get a command prompt up and type ping www.google.com -t. This will send packets continuously to Google - and tell you what the round trip time is. Run it on wired and wireless, compare the results.
- Do both of those tests using a connection to the router only as well - wired and wireless.

At a guess it is probably your internet connection being intermittent - it is st for a moment, you try it elsewhere and it is good again.

Have you updated anything recently? Fiddled with the wiring? Try reseating the connections into the router, I’ve noticed that BT router connections are pretty crap compared to a proper switch.

[ramblo93]

xeny said:

Is your test wired connection from the switch or the router?

Seems odd you'd get 7-12 wired when you normally get 15-25 on WiFi - implies there may be a problem that is disrupting wireless and wired, but wired is coping better.

Which model access points, and are you using the controller, or the app on a phone?

The wired connection is from the switch.

I'm using 2 x Ubiquiti Networks UAP-AC-LITE WLAN Access Points. They were installed using the phone app (i unfortunately can't seem to log in to the access points as the u/n-pw doesn't work (tried admin/admin and ubnt/ubnt but neither work).

Re the speeds what i wrote was a bit confusing. When we first set it all up after moving to fibre broadband we used to get a max of 25mps. From recent tests the max we get is about 12mps. Maybe that is down to more neighbours being on fibre now (we're rural and about 1km from the cabinet) and/or more people wfh and using the bandwidth.

Just done some tests and the speed i get via wifi is 12mps versus 15mps via a wired connection from the switch.

Earlier (before i rebooted everything) i was getting 0.25mps via wifi but still getting 7mps via wired connection from the switch.

[xeny]

ramblo93 said:

The wired connection is from the switch.

I'm using 2 x Ubiquiti Networks UAP-AC-LITE WLAN Access Points. They were installed using the phone app (i unfortunately can't seem to log in to the access points as the u/n-pw doesn't work (tried admin/admin and ubnt/ubnt but neither work).

Re the speeds what i wrote was a bit confusing. When we first set it all up after moving to fibre broadband we used to get a max of 25mps. From recent tests the max we get is about 12mps. Maybe that is down to more neighbours being on fibre now (we're rural and about 1km from the cabinet) and/or more people wfh and using the bandwidth.

Just done some tests and the speed i get via wifi is 12mps versus 15mps via a wired connection from the switch.

Earlier (before i rebooted everything) i was getting 0.25mps via wifi but still getting 7mps via wired connection from the switch.

Those APs should be easily able to do >15 mps even to 2.4GHz clients. I'd be tempted to take the less critical one, reset it and create a new username/password (I'd very much expect you were required to set one when everything was originally deployed).

You can then reset the other one and also manage it with the new username and password.

That would let you get more up to date firmware on there, and use the app to get some idea what is going on/how they are configured.

If you've not already got it, Ubiquiti's WiFiman app is useful gives you speed tests and a channel scanner on android at least so you can confirm if you're on the quietest available channels.

[grumbas]

Could be a device on the network going faulty...

I had a similar set of circumstances that was ultimately resolved by removing a powerline extender that I can only assume was for some reason flooding the network with broadcast packets for some reason.

In the office I've had a faulty port on a Sonicwall firewall before now, took down 50 odd users and took an awfully long time to diagnose! The only symptom was seriously degrading performance.

[ramblo93]

xeny said:

I'd be tempted to take the less critical one, reset it and create a new username/password (I'd very much expect you were required to set one when everything was originally deployed).

You can then reset the other one and also manage it with the new username and password.

That sounds like a good plan of action.

Is there any way of telling which access point a device (laptop and phone) is using? Reason being the wife and i both wfh so I don't want to take down the access point we connect to for work incase it al goes horribly wrong. We both sit kinda in between the two points (one is downstairs at one end of the house and the other is upstairs at the other....we work upstairs in the middle!)

[xeny]

Great question.

Trivially if you can get at the management interface. Without that, look at answer 2 here: https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/quest...

I'd hope the MAC address is on the bottom of the AP.

Alternatively unplug one (I'd start with downstairs) and see if things get any worse upstairs?

[jimmyjimjim]

I'll echo the thought that it's a device on the network failing that's the issue. I would also comment it might not be the AP itself at fault - it could be a switch, or the router itself.
In my experience, I've had 2 network switches fail and behave similarly; I'd isolate those first. They're cheap enough these days to replace (a netgear 5 port gigabit switch is $13 on amazon).

[rxe]

ramblo93 said:

That sounds like a good plan of action.

Is there any way of telling which access point a device (laptop and phone) is using? Reason being the wife and i both wfh so I don't want to take down the access point we connect to for work incase it al goes horribly wrong. We both sit kinda in between the two points (one is downstairs at one end of the house and the other is upstairs at the other....we work upstairs in the middle!)

What/where is the management console for the Unifi network devices? The capability of the management tools is 90% of the reason for having Unifi APs.

Two thoughts, especially if you’re sitting there thinking “management console?”

1) If a preconfigured AP is getting POE but no data, then it will scream away and let you join, but you will have zero connectivity. If you are flipping between two AP, this may give the symptoms you are seeing. I had this when my son randomly connected an AP to a POE injector while he was trying to get the PlayStation working. The AP powered up, had no data, but killed connectivity in half the house,

2) There was an update to the way SSIDs are rolled out a few months ago. The net result was that unless you explicitly redeployed the SSID to existing devices, they would look fine, but not have your SSID on the AP. This is visible in the console, look at a device, select WLAN, you should see the your ?SSID for both ath0 and ath1. If you just see a gibberish load of letters, it’s default and you need to redeploy (very easy, just tick the box on the console).

[ramblo93]

Well i managed to get both the wife's and my work laptops on wired connections (so hopefully wont lose access to work) and reset both of the access points. Before doing that i changed the SSID of BT smart hub to ensure a clean start. I then reset both access points and hooked them up as standalone devices using the unif app. Reconnected all the phones, ipads etc and all seemed to work again.

All was working great with various devices connecting to both access points for a few hours until now when the wifi seems to have died for all devices. Not sure if it is related but as soon as i unplugged my macbookpro from the ethernet and tried to use wifi in the bedroom it refused to connect. Initially said ithe wifi network had no IP address then it said it was connected but was not working. Maybe it was a coincidence but no other devices could then connect to wifi.

Speeds seem to have consistently been 15mps which im ok with. So now the issue seems to be more about the wifi network dieing than variable speeds.

Im not sure what my next step is.

I had a switch fail 3 years ago so maybe it is that again? A new 24 port switch is only £35 so might be worth a try.

Or maybe is it the macbookpro messing things up on the network?

Any more thoughts?

[jimmyjimjim]

The next time its happens, unplug the switch power, plug it back in.

[ramblo93]

jimmyjimjim said:

The next time its happens, unplug the switch power, plug it back in.

Just tried that and it didnt seem to work. When my pixel phone tries to connect to the SSID it says 'IP configuration failure'...

When i try to connect my macbook it says 'Wifi does not have an IP address and cannot connect to the internet'...

WHen i plug the macbook back in to the ethernet (which also runs through the switch) the connection is fine.

Edited by ramblo93 on Tuesday 10th August 07:08

Edited by ramblo93 on Tuesday 10th August 07:14

[ramblo93]

Well i'll be damned. Just plugged the Macbook back into to the ethernet and the wifi is working again for all other devices...will leave it plugged in to make sure it's not a coincidence.

Next up is how to fix the macbookpro so it doesn't crash the network on wifi?!

[GranpaB]

You must turn off the wifi on the homehub completely!

[ramblo93]

GranpaB said:

You must turn off the wifi on the homehub completely!

Do you mean turn off the wifi on the router and only use the unif access points to create the wifi network?

[weeboot]

ramblo93 said:

Do you mean turn off the wifi on the router and only use the unif access points to create the wifi network?

It'd make your wireless environment more controllable, but if the SSIDs are different it's not an absolute requirement.

[NoTreadLeft]

ramblo93 said:

Well i'll be damned. Just plugged the Macbook back into to the ethernet and the wifi is working again for all other devices...will leave it plugged in to make sure it's not a coincidence

This sounds a lot like a problem I had recently. After a lot of investigation I found that a whole bank of ports on my switch were going “bad”: they would sometimes work depending on what else was plugged-in and (seemingly) what day of the week it was. As always it was a Netgear switch - 24 port gig-e, 2-3 years old. Probably the fourth I’ve junked now? Their stuff feels nice & solid but honestly I’ve had so many issues with it over the years.

[xeny]

weeboot said:

It'd make your wireless environment more controllable, but if the SSIDs are different it's not an absolute requirement.

The traffic from the router's WiFi beacon transmissions also costs you a little bit of bandwidth on that channel, so I tend to turn it off simply on that basis.

[ramblo93]

I'm running an OS update ont he mac to see if that makes it any better.

Failing that i'll leave the macbook on ethernet for a few days to see if that isolates the issue. If that doesn't work i may just get a new switch and see if that solves it!