Possible improvement to wifi performance #700
Description
I know there are numerous threads running on troubleshooting wifi. I've been following along with my own issues, but haven't dived in as I'm still playing catch up on several things people are trying with varying degrees of success.
However, I did make a change earlier this week which seems to have delivered a massive improvement. It's still early days, but I figured I'd report it in case others want to try it and we can see if it is actually a thing or I've just been lucky with a sustained connection for a week or so.
TLDR: If your powerwall is on dual band router with band steering/smart connect and/or is connecting with WPA2/WPA3, try creating a 2.4Ghz WPA2 guest network and add the powerwall to that instead.
More detail:
- I've got an Asus RT-AX86U dual band router, which I've set up to support band switch and authentication using WPA2/WPA3.
- I've been having ongoing problems with PW2 connectivity since mid July when my firmware updated to the one that broke the routing option. I assumed my problems were entirely due to this change.
- I'm running PWD on an Intel Nuc hardwired to my LAN with a separate aerial connecting to the TEG network. It's pretty well the same as a raspberry pi setup.
- I've been trying different solutions to make the TEG connection more reliable with limited success - we get anywhere between 2 and 4 drop outs per week.
- On Monday I discovered that the Powerwall had lost it's connection to my LAN (not the TEG network).
- I spent about 3 hours trying to get it to reconnect, and it flat out would not connect to the dual band network - I don't know if it was authentication, band steering or something else.
- Eventually, the app gave me an exclamation warning on the network, at which point I threw my hands up in the air and tried the 2.4Ghz guest network with WPA2 only. I've now had 6 days without any drops.
- Of course I made this change 2 hours after buying a gl.inet Opal. Yay!
If this is a fix, it's a weird one - it suggests that the problem is with the PW maintaining a connection to our LAN/internet, rather than the PWD maintaining it's connection to the PW? I'm still seeing plenty of excessive retries and invalid misc on the PWD machine wifi connection, but it doesn't seem to be killing the connection anymore. I think signal strength may also have improved ~20dbm.
This is definitely not a slam dunk - but I'll keep it open so others can give this a try if relevant. If I go back to more frequent drop outs I'll close this.