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Are Vigor APs useless with Apple devices?

  • wilsodg
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08 Feb 2021 12:19 #1 by wilsodg
Are Vigor APs useless with Apple devices? was created by wilsodg
Large house - 3 floors 1700 sq ft (170sqm) each. 13m x13m square. Brick/concrete walls/thermal block walls everywhere including internals. Extended a bit some some internals are double skinned. Large double chimney up the middle. All floors are engineered oak with foil-backed underlay.
Main comms room on top floor slightly off-centre, and Vigor 2925 Dual wan router. Fabulous, but poor reception on ground floor or if you other side of chimney. When I use the router for WIFI, I get top speeds on upload/download (speedtest to outside is 75mb down/20 up - so I know that wifi speed is at least or more than this).

A neighbour either side, one with a BT router and wifi, the other thinks wifi will fry his brains.

To improve coverage, I have 2 x 910c APs, and 2x902 APs.
Router is on Ch 3. One floor down & 5m offset is a ceiling mounted 910C on channel 7 (exact middle of house). This is above a galleried landing and intended to provide coverage to all rooms. Bandwidth is set at 20mhz, so should have no overlap or conflict. I have placed a 902 on ground floor in kitchen area which is separated by 3-4 solid brick walls from Landing AP, and if the 902 is turned off you get no signal from Router or the Landing AP channel 10, BW 20 MHz. No overlap to other AP's.
The second 910c is ceiling mounted in conservatory on channel 13, BW 20mhz, and no overlap. Second 902 is in box.

Band steering is off, but both 5G and 2.4 are available. Same SSID throughout. All APs wired through netgear POE smart managed plus and pro Gb switches. Cat 6 and Cat 7 cabling. Wired throughput is fine. On roaming, I have tried OFF, Strictly Minimum RSSI, and Mimimum RSSI - it does not seem to make much difference - I have tried default parameters, lower and higher. Band steering had a negative, because it effectively delays re-connection to a 2.4GHz band, so it made things worse (as expected). Using WPA2/PSK AES encryption.

I also tried enabling Fast Roaming - it speeds up switching between APs, but of course is doing nothing for throughput.

We use all Apple mobile devices - phones, pads. The problem is that despite showing 3 bars on the device, we get almost zero throughput. Sometimes it can be acceptable, but most of the time the iphone sits there waiting for network throughput.

Update - I noticed that with the APs on, if the phone connects on 5GHz to the router, then zero throughput. If I turn router WIFI off, then APs function - albeit only at 40mb. Is it possible there are compatibility issues between 2925 wifi and 902/910 roaming?

Any advice gratefully received. Failing Vigor, any advice for decent APs? I had Cisco 121s before, and they just worked but were not AC

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  • wilsodg
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08 Feb 2021 17:28 #2 by wilsodg
Replied by wilsodg on topic Re: Are Vigor APs useless with Apple devices?
Having spent a day trying to sort this, I have made some progress.
Turning off the 2925 wifi and replacing it with the spare 902 has made a marked improvement (no black hole for the Apple devices). So it seems that when a device on the AP's want to roam, somehow the 2925 is blocking data. I can now wander around the house and the phones change AP almost seamlessly. Moral of saga - Router wifi is fine stand-alone, but if you want to extend it, it's better to go with all external APs and turn router wifi off. Which is counter to the marketing blurb from draytek.

Settings.
Channels selected so no/minimal overlap. Bandwidth = Auto (seems to select 20).
Under roaming, Strictly Min RSSI is -70db (50%). Fast Roaming Pre-Caching of passwords is set to 600 minutes.
Band steering is off. In a home environment, I see no benefit to this and (I think) all it does is delay connection to a 2.4MHz connection.

On the Apple devices, under network settings, 'private address' is turned off (fixes the mac address), and the mac is bound to an IP (so devices always get the same IP and have the same MAC).
Link speeds in the 100+mb range. Real download from speedtester is approaching wired speeds (70mb)

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  • hornbyp
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08 Feb 2021 23:42 #3 by hornbyp
Replied by hornbyp on topic Re: Are Vigor APs useless with Apple devices?
Let me start by saying, I know very little about Apple products...

My thoughts:-

wilsodg wrote:
Turning off the 2925 wifi and replacing it with the spare 902 has made a marked improvement (no black hole for the Apple devices). So it seems that when a device on the AP's want to roam, somehow the 2925 is blocking data. I can now wander around the house and the phones change AP almost seamlessly. Moral of saga - Router wifi is fine stand-alone, but if you want to extend it, it's better to go with all external APs and turn router wifi off. Which is counter to the marketing blurb from draytek.


You seem to have found an interaction - though I'm not convinced it's quite what you think...

It's always the client, that decides what to connect to. Access Points can 'boot them off' and can stop them connecting - they can't, however, force them to connect, in the first place. This is how the various AP-assisted roaming schemes work: i.e. disconnect the client and then add it to a (timed) block-list.

SYSLOG is the place to look for diagnostics - collecting all the APs via one central Syslog server makes it easier to see the overall interactions.


Settings.
Channels selected so no/minimal overlap.


That's got to be good.

Bandwidth = Auto (seems to select 20).


Wider is better (i.e. faster - but if you're only accessing the Internet, this may not matter). 5GHz is measurably faster than 2.4GHz, if it still gives you the range you require. Again channel width has an effect (watch out for Sky Q boxes using all the available non-DFS channels, by-default!)

Under roaming, Strictly Min RSSI is -70db (50%).


With an all Draytek implementation, the "Minimum RSSI" (the cooperative scheme) ought to work better. Rather than just chopping a client, it only happens if the APs agree it would be beneficial. You could experiment with Transmit Power settings as well, if devices are tending to 'hang on' to the first AP they encounter.

Band steering is off. In a home environment, I see no benefit to this


I agree - and sometimes it fails miserably, bouncing clients to a totally different AP :cry:
I went further and separated the 2.4GHz and 5GHz SSIDs (on the basis that they are separate radio systems, with nothing in common!)

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09 Feb 2021 11:07 #4 by piste basher
Replied by piste basher on topic Re: Are Vigor APs useless with Apple devices?
Hmm - yesterday I updated my iPhone 11 and 3 iPads to iOS 14.4 (I run a 2926ac and a mesh of AP903s)

The Apple devices all then complained that on my main wifi network I had "weak security" - claiming that "my" setting of WPA/WPA2 was weak - even though my ACTUAL setting was WPA2 Personal - and suggesting that I change it to WPA3.

So I changed all the AP903s to WPA3 Personal, as suggested by the Apple devices. The 2926 doesn't have the option of WPA3 so I left that at WPA2.

Now they all say that they are "Unable to Join the Network"

:roll: :roll: :roll:

Update - I changed all the AP903s back to WPA2 Personal and the i-devices now connect once again, with no complaints about "weak security" - no idea what's going on there.

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15 Feb 2021 19:22 #5 by tazladd
Replied by tazladd on topic Re: Are Vigor APs useless with Apple devices?

hornbyp wrote:
Let me start by saying, I know very little about Apple products...

My thoughts:-

wilsodg wrote:
Turning off the 2925 wifi and replacing it with the spare 902 has made a marked improvement (no black hole for the Apple devices). So it seems that when a device on the AP's want to roam, somehow the 2925 is blocking data. I can now wander around the house and the phones change AP almost seamlessly. Moral of saga - Router wifi is fine stand-alone, but if you want to extend it, it's better to go with all external APs and turn router wifi off. Which is counter to the marketing blurb from draytek.


You seem to have found an interaction - though I'm not convinced it's quite what you think...

It's always the client, that decides what to connect to. Access Points can 'boot them off' and can stop them connecting - they can't, however, force them to connect, in the first place. This is how the various AP-assisted roaming schemes work: i.e. disconnect the client and then add it to a (timed) block-list.

SYSLOG is the place to look for diagnostics - collecting all the APs via one central Syslog server makes it easier to see the overall interactions.


Settings.
Channels selected so no/minimal overlap.


That's got to be good.

Bandwidth = Auto (seems to select 20).


Wider is better (i.e. faster - but if you're only accessing the Internet, this may not matter). 5GHz is measurably faster than 2.4GHz, if it still gives you the range you require. Again channel width has an effect (watch out for Sky Q boxes using all the available non-DFS channels, by-default!)

Under roaming, Strictly Min RSSI is -70db (50%).


With an all Draytek implementation, the "Minimum RSSI" (the cooperative scheme) ought to work better. Rather than just chopping a client, it only happens if the APs agree it would be beneficial. You could experiment with Transmit Power settings as well, if devices are tending to 'hang on' to the first AP they encounter.

Band steering is off. In a home environment, I see no benefit to this


I agree - and sometimes it fails miserably, bouncing clients to a totally different AP :cry:
I went further and separated the 2.4GHz and 5GHz SSIDs (on the basis that they are separate radio systems, with nothing in common!)



What would you suggest for min RSSI then in an home environment?

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  • hornbyp
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16 Feb 2021 01:06 #6 by hornbyp
Replied by hornbyp on topic Re: Are Vigor APs useless with Apple devices?

tazladd wrote:
What would you suggest for min RSSI then in an home environment?



Since I have a large amount of overlap between APs, I went for the minimum of -62dBm, ("with adjacaent AP RSSI over" = 5) on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz.

I had a great idea of trying to reduce the TX Power as well - but it didn't seem to go too well: http://www.forum.draytek.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=23882

This chap sets out the argument as to why it's good approach: https://metis.fi/en/2017/10/txpower/

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