Hi has anyone had experience with dealing with Direct Roku wifi? I have a customer that has poor uplink RSSI and poor uplink SNR, on a e3K with 9 other subs. The uplink SNR jumps continually between -71 RSSI to -61 RSSI and from 19 SNR to 29 SNR.
Did a scan and can see a Roku Direct in the exact same 5GHz frequency as the antenna and sector. The customer has Roku devices so I had him power down the roku devices and still the device shows up and in the same frequency as the Antenna… I am suspecting that this is probably a neighbors device… I hate to revamp my frequency plan just because of one customer… all other 9 subs working great. But strangely the said troublemaker device is showing up with a -62 signal… so I just assumed it was from inside the customers house… the router we set up for them in the 5GHz wifi is showing -68, its on a non conflicting frequency.
OK, the reason I asked was the Cambium Spectrum Analyzer in the SMs don’t always provide totally trustworthy info. But if you’ve double checked with a router which you trust, then that’s cool.
So “Uplink” SNR issues caused by RF interference would be on the AP end and effect everyone else connected to the AP. If it is the customer end seeing the Roku then it would effect downlink far more than uplink. In fact if the interference was bad enough on the customer end to noticeably effect uplink I would think it would have to be completely wrecking downlink.
Also, I don’t believe RF interference effects the RSSI reading or would cause RSSI to jump around so I think your “uplink” jitter is something else (misaligned radio / physical interference). That said, if he is seeing the AP at -71 and the Roku at -62 on the same/overlapping channel I would wonder how this customer’s downlink is working at all.
We have had to let customers go because one of their neighbors installed something that wrecked their connection. Way back in the day I might have moved an AP to different frequency in order to resolve a single customer’s interference issues but after you get more access points playing musical channels (when you change the channel on one AP now you have to change it on another and then another one and another one…) just isn’t an option anymore.
Even in cases where the customer can see 2 AP’s on the same tower well enough to just have them connect to the other AP it can become a headache because you are having to deal with this every single time one of their neighbor’s reboots one of their devices and it decides to run on an interfering channel.
Honestly, usually, the best bet is possibly use a different client radio with a narrower beamwidth or better front/back (we have swapped a couple of customers over to RF Element’s horns in cases like this) or try to find a spot where their radio can’t see their neighbor’s stuff.
As per my stats, @brubble1 mentioned that the uplink snr and rssi are the problem so the issue is at the AP, or is it something close but along the path of SM to AP?
The neighbor knows no more about channels and wireless and stuff than your average customer does so guess who is going to have to log into and reconfigure their Wifi or wireless bridge in box or Roku or Epson Printer or whatever?
Oh yeah, now you did it, you touched their stuff, you changed something and from that point forward, for years … till the end of time … every single time that neighbor’s netflix buffers, or a web page doesn’t load instantly or the new smart tv isn’t working or one of the kid’s phones won’t connect to the wifi or the wifi signal from the house isn’t working reliably in the barn 600ft from the router… “It was working fine before you guys changed stuff !”
Yeah, lets make ourselves responsible for not just our paying customer’s real and imagined problems but lets become free tech support for all their neighbor’s real and imagined problems also…
That’s just the tip of the iceberg… the list of way’s even talking to the neighbor will come back and bite you are endless and painful.
the uplink snr and rssi are the problem so the issue is at the AP, or is it something close but along the path of SM to AP?
So looking at your monitor / wireless you have at least one other customer being seen by the AP at -71 and the first thing that jumps out is… why are those two radios at -71 the second question would be, is the other -71 having uplink problems ?
I mean, -71 isn’t a problem in of itself if your noise floor is -90 or so but it probably isn’t… So I’m guessing that the -71 is indeed a problem but not caused by RF interference (that would normally present with expected RSSI level but much lower than expected MCS and it would be your MCS bouncing around instead of the RSSI).
Looking at that Monitor/Wireless you have 2 radios that are misaimed, malfunctioning, have physical interference (a tree limb moving in the breeze) or misconfigured ( TX power not where it should be).
EDIT: Just reread and see that you have them on F300 25’s so this is very unlikely to be misconfigured Atenna Gain.
Something you might look at, in the radio, what is Configuration > Radio > Antenna Gain set at ? We have a default template that we load onto all radios and at one point realized that since the template was created on an F200 the “Antenna Gain” was being set to 25 on every radio we loaded it on … even the F180s’ . So I had a bunch of F180’s and F190’s all using much lower TX (Max TX Power Auto) power than they should have been.
However the fact that you say this radio’s RSSI fluctuates a lot I lean more towards misaligned, bad radio or physical obstruction (tree limb moving in the wind).
Hey DM2020, if I can make a quick comment about your screen shot for the benefit of everyone in the community watching this thread.
In fact, you do have uplink interference, which is something impairing the receiver at the tower site. While the RSSI and SNR are snapshots - taken at a particular moment in time, the MCS levels are the result of the “math” of the SNR + bit or packet error rate over time. In this case, which is very normal, btw, your downlink MCS is 9 on almost all SM’s, while your uplink MCS is all over the map. RF propagation is reciprocal, meaning path loss in both DL and UL are always the same, and if we don’t see the same SNR and as a result, the same MCS in both DL and UL, then the receiver on the lower MCS is having issues - in your case the receiver at the tower is being impeded by uplink noise rise.
The reason I say this is normal is that the AP’s antenna is usually high, and the SM’s antenna is usually low compared to the AP, so the AP is much more likely to experience interference (or noise rise as its called in the radio planning universe).
When you look at your system, the MCS level is the most important metric when analyzing RF performance, since it takes RSSI and noise floor into consideration over time. SNR = RSSI - Noise floor, and MCS=(SNR + Error Rate)/Time.
