SA520W Wireless Awful

[blueccarthur]

Hopefully someone will be able to shed some light on this but I have little hope. After testing this in a home environment for 6 months I have to say the SA520 wifi just isn't usable. Yesterday I had time to sit down for a few hours and do better testing and the results are just bad. I've read all the forum posts here about the issues as well.

To start, I setup the SA520W several months back and updated the firmware as each release came out. I setup one main/data SSID and a guest one. Both have always been g/n enabled. The router is sitting in plain sight in my living room with all antennaes installed. After going straight up the stairs and into a guest room (plain sight up the stairs) the wireless would start getting spotty. This is roughly 40 feet. In a room on the other side of the hall we have a Roku hooked up to a TV and that has also always cut in and out using N or G (tested both).

So, I acquired a Linksys/Cisco RE1000 and put it right in the hall which is plain sight to the SA520 and roughly 30-40 feet away. Coverage with that was improved but frewuently dropped out and we'd have to power cycle the RE1000 at least every other day.

Yesterday I took the repeater out and sat in front of the router. I did a basic ping test to the router LAN interface and found the ping response was always between 50-2500ms. Clearly this was the core problem. I started changing the b/g/n settings and found it was better when set to G only. I'd get pings of 20-250ms with spikes of 1400ms. So while better, still unusable. I frequently switched channels to test and used SSID to monitor strength. The results all ended up being that channel didn't matter and, in the end, neither did the band. It still wasn't usable.

I then turned off the wifi and took one of the Linksys consumer N routers with an internal antennae and plugged it into the SA520 and configured it with the same/similar settings. Instantly the results were what they should be, <1ms-10ms. I went upstairs to the same rooms and had the same results. Coverage was good to great. The Roku no longer had streaing issues and tablets could access perfect. This was all without the repeater.

If someone has any other input or advice on what to test with the wireless please let me know. However, I think it's time to give up on the SA520 wireless.

[douglasfenton]

It is awful, I wasted much of a day on this yesterday.   I just ran a speedtest.net using the SA520W and it gets .5 Mbps , yes that is point 5.

I just bought the SA520W - I was going to buy the SA520 to replace an 6 year old router / VPN / Firewall that reboots several times a day.  I then without much research thought I will order the W version, that way I will replace 2 units with 1.  My apple time capsule that has built in N does a very consistent 14.7 Mbps with speedtest.net - since my DSL is 15Mbps this is full speed.

After trying to get the Cisco device to perform well, changing settings, etc - I have gone back to using the apple time capsule along with the SA520W.  I was hoping the W with the 3 big ant - would have better range , but it is just bad-bad. 

I would like to send the thing back - but with the work involved I will just keep it and turn the wireless part off. 

I find it hard to believe that the thing is really that bad.  I keep thinking I am missing something, setting wise.  But at 3 feet, my mac pro does .51 Mps connected to this thing. There has been short times, when it does perform sort of OK - like 8 or 9 Mps - but it is not consistent.  I have tried it with other devices, some of them will not connect to it.    Even things like a wireless web cam , is too slow to use with the W. 

I hope if I am missing something, that someone will reply to this post.  So far with one day of ownership the SA520W is a big disappointed.

The routing part works - The VPN works (but I have some config details to work out).

Doug

[jonatrod]

Good morning

Thanks for using our forum

Hi Douglas my name is Johnnatan and I am part of the Small business Support community.

If you want a more precise information about your bandwidth, you´d better try a ping  to a server from your ISP. Yeah, some sites could provide you information about your network speed, however you have to have some points on consideration such, how many services does your device has activated in the moment you do the speed test, for example having the IPS activated, it  reduces the performance of your device, also having activated a lot of VPN tunnels, if you want to have more precise  information of your device speed I  recommend you to lower or stop all other internet activities during the broadband speed test. In other cases the results are less precise.

I hope you find this answer useful, if it was satisfactory  for you, please mark the question as Answered. Please rate post you consider useful.

Greetings,

Johnnatan Rodriguez Miranda.

Cisco network support engineer.

[Clayton Sill]

Hello,

Make sure you are not running firmware 2.1.72. It is not a firmware that is listed on the cisco website and I heard there was a lot of wireless issues with that firmware. For some reason a lot of the new SA500 are coming with this 2.1.72 that isn't released on the website. Normally you could downgrade to 2.1.71 and be good to go but there is a new firmware that has come out and may want to look into upgrading that firmware and give it a shot.

Hope that helps,

Thanks,

Clayton Sill