R195W - poor WiFi performance

Products Residential Wi-Fi
1

We have 30+ R195W routers in service and up until about two weeks ago were happy with the performance. The last 3 customers, however have been very disappointed with both range and throughput. Two of these customers switched to us from Comcast–a company notorious for poor WiFi. Both customers saw a significant decrease in range and throughput on WiFi after switching to us. For one customer we installed a second (wired) R195W in the house and we still can’t match Comcast’s range. Anyone else particularly happy or disappointed with R195W WiFi performance lately? Any chance we have a bad batch? These latest units are all from the
same 10-pack box. All parameters except SSID and passphrase are default. Speedtest.net shows 900+ x 900+ Mbps while wired. 2.4 WiFi isn’t bad at 50 or so. 5 GHz WiFi isn’t getting much beyond 60 or 70 Mbps in the same room and sub 10 Mbps two rooms away. Newish iPhones and laptops as test clients. High density suburban single family dwellings with lots of other WiFi but that is not unusual for us. Even non-technical customers can tell when our WiFi is significantly worse than Comcast and want to switch back to them. Not good.

2

Try the beta firmwares see if that helps you. We’ve never had any luck with R series routers of any flavor, and have pulled them all out of the network.

I should note we never had problems with wired connections either, only wireless.

3

Beta notes talk about fixing “5GHz radio initialization issue” and “UDP DL throughput degradation over long time on 5 GHz”. We are not seeing the performance degrade. Just not performing at all any time.
Thanks for your input Ryan.

4

Hi Paul,
IS it possible for you to try the below steps

  1. upgrade router to latest 4.7.1-B3 firmware
  2. factory reset
  3. Test again
  4. If step 3 shows same results, try configuring a static channel (which you find relatively clean)
  5. Run 5 GHz speet test again.

NOTE : 2 rooms away 5 GHz may drop significantly depending on distance and obstructions, and we can’t do much about it, it is just how 5 GHz is.

5

@ashutoshdatta: We have installed hundreds of 5 GHz WiFi routers in this environment. We are aware of the propagation capabilities of 802.11AC and what they should do two rooms away. And while it is difficult to get good performance data from a customer you are also missing the most important thing. These customers are doing a back-to-back comparison of Comcast provided WiFi and your R195W AC-Wave2-class router. As I said in the OP, any customer can feel the performance difference between what we provide today and what they had yesterday. Comcast was selling them 300 Mbps and delivering 60. We are delivering 1000 to the house and they are getting 10 to their iPhone in the same place in the house.
What about 4.7.1-B3 is going to fix this specific problem? Is there more to this firmware than the release notes say? Remember we are seeing this with 3 or 4 R195W devices in different houses.

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6

Hi Paul,
I am happy to hear that you are technologically knowledgeable about 5 GHz propagation issues. But I would like to correct some facts here. The R195W is 802.11AC (2x2 Wave 1) router, and it is a low end device. I dont think this is suitable to be used if you are provisioning a 1Gpbs connection to a subscriber. It may keep the customer always unhappy. 300Mbps is the max you can expect from this OTA. It would be advisable to deploy the R195P in this situation which is a more powerful router.
Coming back to the issue. Well I wanted to identify where the problem could be hence I asked for some basic trials. Like latest firmware, factory reset , and manual channel selection. This would tell us if the cause is environmental firmware related.
If would be nice if all the above gives no conclusive results, then if you could try a different R195W unit in the same scenario. That would confirm if it is a unit specific problem.

thanks
ashutosh

7

No one delivers 1 Gbps WiFi. Our customers on this plan hard wire most of their devices.
Some people have smart phones that can’t be hard wired so we also provide WiFi. The 1 Gbps statement in the OP was to show observed WiFi test results were not Internet bandwidth limited purposes of getting input from technical readers.
Many customers are not tolerate of being used as a beta site. I can’t afford multiple trips to the same customer–in terms of time or reputation. Someone else will have to work out the bugs in this equipment.
I was not aware the R195W released just a few months ago was such a low end router. My error. The Cambium sales literature highlighted its increased range over older Cambium models. I can’t find anything on the data sheet that implies the R195P is any different than the W, besides the obvious ATA and POE out. Same gain. Same ERIP. So we will avoid the entire product line from here on out.
In case this helps others, today I replaced four $68 2020 release 2x2 R195W routers with $93 2016 vintage 3x3 ASUS RT-AC66U routers. Dramatically better throughput and range. Now 240 Mbps in the same room as the router. And two rooms away it did 120 where the R195W couldn’t do 10 in the same spot. Well worth the $25 upgrade to ASUS.

8

Ashutosh,

  • Is the R195P a 2x2 Wave 2 router (Your post suggests it might not be Wave 1)?
  • If so, does the R195P support band steering?
  • Is it manufactured by the same place as the other R-Series routers, or is it from another source?
  • The datasheet shows the only difference is an ATA and PoE out… what features make this a better router?

Thank you, Chris

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