In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Thanks for confirming. Your iPhone 12 Pro should have near identical performance to the IPad, however I think you said in the other thread you were getting 440/400 down/up on the iPhone on LAN to LAN is that correct?

That’s right.

Where I’m sat right now it’s 440/440 down/up for the iPhone and 650/600 for the iPad LAN to LAN Speedtest.

iPhone is hitting 200/75 and the iPad is hitting 290/75 for LAN to WAN tests.

I've just been playing around with the WiFi settings.
Have completely separated the bands (previously had one SSiD that covered both bands and one that's 5Ghz).
On the 5Ghz one I've changed the width from Auto to force 80Mhz.
I've also reduced the power of two of the three APs.

Now, I've just run the tests again on my iPhone and hitting 400/73 down/up for LAN to WAN.

So that's interesting. Still doesn't explain for me why I see this discrepancy with LAN v. WAN though.

Your iPad is doing about the top whack of what I’ve seen on my 802.11AC based APs using an iPhone12. The PHY rate for this device on AC is 866 Mbps; so you’re probably not going to see much more than 650 Mbps in both directions on your current APs, thereabouts what you’re getting…

Now the iPhone is an interesting one, it’s running the same wireless spec in theory as the tablet but only achieving two thirds of the throughput. So to my mind it’s rate limited due to poor radio performance.. Moreover it’s antennas will not be as performant as the tablet, so it will be far more sensitive to ideal placement, position and distance with respect to the APs.

I’m also not sure if the phone is holding onto a weaker signal from another AP. You could check by shutting down the other APs, switching off all or as much of your other WiFi client gear and doing a single client to AP test to see if you can get better throughout. The fact your throughput increased as you lowered your AP power leads me to believe that is the case.

Edited by Pheasant (Fri 08-Oct-21 20:38:46)

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Your iPad is doing about the top whack of what I’ve seen on my 802.11AC based APs using an iPhone12. The PHY rate for this device on AC is 866 Mbps; so you’re probably not going to see much more than 650 Mbps in both directions on your current APs, thereabouts what you’re getting…

Now the iPhone is an interesting one, it’s running the same wireless spec in theory as the tablet but only achieving two thirds of the throughput. So to my mind it’s rate limited due to poor radio performance.. Moreover it’s antennas will not be as performant as the tablet, so it will be far more sensitive to ideal placement, position and distance with respect to the APs.

I’m also not sure if the phone is holding onto a weaker signal from another AP. You could check by shutting down the other APs, switching off all or as much of your other WiFi client gear and doing a single client to AP test to see if you can get better throughout. The fact your throughput increased as you lowered your AP power leads me to believe that is the case.

Thanks Pheasant.

I think that after my changes last night (separation of SSID bands, channel width + power output adjustments) I'm now seeing more consistency in the WAN speedtest results. Specifically in the MacBook & iPads.
I'm less worried by speeds to the iPhones, just because it would be incredibly rare to need that much speed anyway. I'm getting at least 200Mbps on it, which is more than enough.

I still find it odd that I was seeing the inconsistency / discrepancy in results between LAN and WAN...but it's simply not worth the effort to work out

Fair play Miles. WiFi performance issues can be challenging to diagnose (and fully resolve) and a bit of a diminishing return.

As long as your key devices are getting decent enough throughput that’s all that matters. Couple of other things I’d mention…

1. On the 5 GHz band try and eliminate all ‘legacy’ 802.11N based clients that could potentially be causing the AP to drop performance on that band to maintain compatibility
2. Try and keep all ‘low performance’ clients on the 2.4 GHz band if you can. Put the devices with the highest bandwidth performance requirements on the 5 GHz band
3. Check for no overlapping channels, esp. with 80 MHz wide setups (but your controller should look after that)
4. Turn down the AP output power as much as possible - though you’ve already done that but you could experiment with different transmit powers and also think about the location of each AP and it’s relationship with other APs. You could look to tweak the power on individual AP to possibly improve their performance. You can do a ready reckoner radio survey with your MBP
5. Don’t know if TP-Link supports it, but you could also experiment with “minimum RSSI” on the AP, such that weak (and hence slow) connections get dropped by the AP. However this might impact usability with all devices. As you’ve already split the SSIDs across the bands then beam steering isn’t necessary.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Fair play Miles. WiFi performance issues can be challenging to diagnose (and fully resolve) and a bit of a diminishing return.

As long as your key devices are getting decent enough throughput that’s all that matters. Couple of other things I’d mention…

1. On the 5 GHz band try and eliminate all ‘legacy’ 802.11N based clients that could potentially be causing the AP to drop performance on that band to maintain compatibility
2. Try and keep all ‘low performance’ clients on the 2.4 GHz band if you can. Put the devices with the highest bandwidth performance requirements on the 5 GHz band
3. Check for no overlapping channels, esp. with 80 MHz wide setups (but your controller should look after that)
4. Turn down the AP output power as much as possible - though you’ve already done that but you could experiment with different transmit powers and also think about the location of each AP and it’s relationship with other APs. You could look to tweak the power on individual AP to possibly improve their performance. You can do a ready reckoner radio survey with your MBP
5. Don’t know if TP-Link supports it, but you could also experiment with “minimum RSSI” on the AP, such that weak (and hence slow) connections get dropped by the AP. However this might impact usability with all devices. As you’ve already split the SSIDs across the bands then beam steering isn’t necessary.

Thanks again Pheasant.
When I first set up the Omada controller last year I did play around with the RSSI values (to improve handover)...but never settled on 'good' values for each.
However, having now adjusted the power output of two of the APs I may revisit this.