Firmware beyond 4.6.4 slows Ethernet port to 100BT

We’ve been happily running 100’s of devices on 4.6.4 for years. A couple of days ago, we upgraded some sites to 4.8 (the next version up according to our cnMaestro self hosted). We wanted to take advantage of flexible framing on the 3000 series APs. We upgraded 2 3000L APs, 2 3000 APs and 2 2000 APs and all the SMs attached (Force 300s, 200s and 180s depending on the AP).

What we noticed is both 3000L APs stopped negotiating at 1Gbps and EVERY SINGLE subscriber module would only negotiate at 100BT.

I then tried 5.10.0 on the 3000L APs to see if that fixed it. No it did not.

We down reved everything back to 4.6.4 and they all connect at 1Gbps now (clients and APs) except one Force 300-25 that during the upgrade stopped connecting to anything on the Ethernet port. Even a downgrade would not fix that one.

Smart speed is off on every radio in our system - I don’t trust that feature. This happened on Force 180s, Force 200s, Force 300-16s and Force 300-25s. Every single one that was upgraded. The only devices that were not impacted were the 2000 and 3000 (not Light) APs. Those were still negotiating at 1Gbps.

I see one other topic like this from a year ago that stopped when they opened a ticket.

I stayed at 4.6.4 because it was stable and worked. I was tired of the firmware shenanigans that seem to be plaguing the ePMP line. I guess we will stay at 4.6.4 until they are all replaced with whatever is next for us.

Hi @Au_Wireless ,

I understand your disappointment.
The thing is that Smart Speed is not our native feature. It is a part or Realtek driver design.
Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) technology, also known as Green Ethernet.
We can not exclude it from Ethernet driver.

We had some glitches before and it was related to other vendors’ Ethenet driver implementation as well. It was never that massive and we sorted such cases one by one for every customer. All issues related to Smart Speed were cleaned long time ago.

If you still see any issue with negotiation when Smart Speed is enabled, please, PM me a techsupport file and I will investigate!