On 4/5/2019 – (11:30a – 5:30p) Coordinated via phone/email and text w/ Stewart to meet at his residence and troubleshoot poor connectivity of his fairly recently installed wifi network. Arrived on site approx. 11:30a and met w/ Stewart where he showed me each of the access points and the internet routers/modems in his office credenza.

– I identified wiring from the office to the front family room entertainment cabinet which then extends to each of the access points.
– I gathered the wifi SSID and WPA2 security key from Stewart and was able to connect to each 2.4ghz and 5ghz networks. (TaylorsCrib/TaylorsCrib5G)
– Initially running speed tests in the office yielded poor results for both networks where the 5ghz was under 30mbps w/ -64db loss and the 2.4ghz under 1mbps w/ -61db loss.
– Performed multiple speed tests via direct Ethernet and always received results exceeding 100mbps
– Tested via both Laptop and Android mobile phone throughout the house using wifi signal meter, checking channels, saturation, bands, frequencies etc. and received poor performance literally everywhere the master bedroom, the office and the far opposite bedroom down the hall being the worst. The master bedroom AP was mounted behind a flat screen and all of the antennas were flat against the wall and pointing straight out except for two on the right side of the unit being broken (will not screw tight) and just hanging. The far end bedroom would not even connect to the 5ghz network and the 2.4ghz resulted in fractions of a 1mbps but often dropped and reconnected making speed tests difficult.
– I then performed a network scan to identify all of the devices on the network and found that .250 is the IP for the POE switch in the entertainment center and was able to log in and go through all of the settings to ensure it isn’t doing anything that would seem to affect performance of the wifi networks.
– I identified each AP as .251, .252, .253 and .254 IPs on the network subnet where (3) of the units were EAP1750 and (1) ENS1750 outdoor. I logged in to each and reviewed each of the settings making note to some slight differences such as the master bedroom AP missing the “5G” in the name for the 5ghz network which could explain some anomalies as this is typical of a “mesh” set up but usually requires some type of software controller to handle the load balancing and doesn’t make sense considering the way the rest of the APs are set up. Also played with different channels switching between manual and auto selection (ultimately leaving at auto as channel saturation fluctuates a lot). After all AP’s matched settings I tested each AP w/ the others disabled (rebooting after each change – very time consuming) in an attempt to isolate if one of the APs is effecting the others but found even w/ no other APs active and directly within a few feet of the chosen AP, the signal strength was never better than .23db and even then the 2.4ghz produced sub par under 10mbps results and still the 5ghz network had extremely poor range but testing directly underneath yielded on avg 20-30mbps results even at -25db which should support 300mbps+ speeds.
– Checked firmware and identified all (3) EAP1750 units running 3.0.0 firmware and Engenius website has 3.0.6 listed. Downloaded firmware after making backups of each AP and performed the first firmware update on the master bedroom and everything appeared to be successful and after approx 5min was back up and running but when I checked the version it was still 3.0.0 even though I had confirmed writing to flash memory. To see if this was a fluke I tried again but had the same result. I then checked online to see if others have had this issue but could not find anything. I tried the hallway AP and it too resulted in remaining v3.0.0. I also noted all EAP1750 shared the same MAC hardware address between the 2.4ghz wireless radio and the LAN ethernet interface which is not industry standard. the outdoor AP, the ENS1750 had a unique MAC hardware address for all 3 interfaces, LAN ETH, 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz so I attempted to reach Engenius tech support but after exhausting multiple efforts found they only provide support via web form and email without any idea if/when they will respond.
– While browsing the Engenius website I found a “preferred settings” for the same model APs and went through the settings w/ very subtle setting changes, rebooting each time and ultimately found that toning down the power freq. on the 2.4ghz had a significant impact on the 5ghz while also further increasing the 5ghz to the full 28db power and was able to consistently remain connected to the 5ghz network throughout the entire home and with a min download speed of 20-30mbps in the further areas (office/opposite far hallway bedroom) but with 100+mbps consistently throughout the rest of the home. I ran these tests for quite some time to ensure it was consistent and wasn’t just intermittent.
– Text and called Luke explaining the many issues and he suggested looking at the Spectrum router as he had a feeling it might be causing some problems. I found the IP on the .1 and connected using the default admin/password login. I checked it’s settings and verified it is providing the DHCP service but wireless is completely turned off. I found a mess of firewall ALG settings enabled but nothing that would seem to affect wifi performance. I even rebooted to see if that has any effect yet the performance remained, not bad for 5ghz but not great and very bad for 2.4ghz ultimately instructing the client to forget and not even use that network.
– Had a detailed conversation w/ the lady of the house in Stewart’s absence prior to leaving explaining that the 5ghz network should perform ok and let them get by w/ most common stuff even streaming movies but it’s not as good as expected and suggest seeing how it goes and if still not satisfactory or reliable to reach back out to us, it may be time to look at other equipment or being more aggressive/persistent w/ Engenius to fix this or refund the hardware.

Site contact:

Stewart Tunson
16727 Krameria Ave.
Riverside, Ca 92504
cell (562) 762-7420

Discounts applied:

* total credit reduction from: $875 to $510 ($365 value – see details below)

Service travel fee. – Minimum 1hr for service address: 16727 Krameria Ave. Riverside, Ca 92504