AP541N - Degrading Service

[lucas4]

We have an AP541N that has been deployed to replace a Cisco 1200 AP (B/G radio).  The 1200 functioned perfectly in our environment.  The new AP541N on the other hand seems to work fine right after a reboot but immediately starts to degrade service.  Over a short period of time, the devices bandwidth degrades to the point were the wireless network is not usable.  This happens with just one device connected.  Eventually, the device stops accepting client connections.  We are unable to get any relevant logging out of the device to help diagnose the problem.

What should be our course of action?

Lucas Budman

Cognilytics

[apbirch]

Wow having the same issues with these just after they have been installed. We have deployed 16 of them, the largest customer has 8 and each customer has reported these issues noted in this thread. Wow blow away that this problem has been going on for 2 years now.. I just put 2 and 2 together last weekend when our NFR device at my house started showing issues.

For us the large issues and what I experienced was that the AP stopped passing or resolving DNS.. Looked at our ticket history and we have a pattern now across all customers we have to reboot every 2 weeks or so. We have not loaded them up so I don't know about the speed issue but for sure DNS stops resolving until a reboot.

- Andrew Birch

[Darrel May]

Andrew,

Open your ticket, submit for a refund and choose another product.

That is what they did with me, no solution just get a different product.

Lots of wasted man hours deploying and troubleshooting these bad products.

Darrel May

[Christopher Adlam]

That doesn't sound like much of a "solution" nor does it lend a lot of confidence in there being a genuine fix forthcoming for the issues you guys are experiencing.

I've got 7 of these in the field and on the latest firmware. Other than the 5Ghz problem (which I simply don't use as a workaround), they have been reliable. However, if these were an IOS device, I'm thinking that things would have been fixed MUCH quicker....

[apbirch]

Darrel,

Yes i would agree to know that the product is bad is somthing that i would not expect out of Cisco that is for sure and this is a bad one for sure.

working with my rep now to get some $$ to fix the issue

Andrew

[Cameron Webster]

Hi

I've just spent the last week trying to get four of these boxes working without success.  I've tried WPA/WPA2 b/g/n, n only, all the other suggestions in this thread, latest firmware, clustered, not clustered.  I still am having the same issue where the performance degrades to unusable levels very quickly.

I've tried PoE, PoE plus, PoE midspans @ 100 Mbps, Gb supporting PoE injectors @ Gb

Has anyone found this issue happening using a mains adapter?  It is the only thing left to try before returning them all, but even if it works with mains, I'll probably be sending them back anyway as we need PoE to work and they seem to be complete rubbish.

Thanks

Cammy

[eskild.skaar]

Hi,

I recently bought two of these, using the latest FW 2.0.4, and I am experiencing the same problem. Stops forwarding DNS traffic, then RDP traffic, then other traffic, only resolved by rebooting the device.

I was very surprised as I have always thought highly of Cisco products. But having devices that gets unstable after a few days, is totaly unacceptable for this price range.

If this issue is not resolved within days, I will return the APs and go for other devices.

//Eskild

[Darrel May]

Eskild,

You will certainly have to get your money back on these units, there is no solution! They are bad from factory and CISCO cannot make them work correctly after 2 years of firmware patches each time saying the issue is resolved, just to find out within a couple of days no the issue is not resolved. This particular issue has caused me to move away from Cisco products and over to ENGENIUS TECHNOLOGIES for my wireless networking needs.

Darrel May

[eskild.skaar]

Hi,

I looked through the release notes for 2.0.4, and one CDETS that fits this issue pretty good is:

CSCth14132—Station Isolation is Sporadic, which should be resolved in 2.0.0.

Can it be that CSCth14132 is not properly resolved for all possible scenarios?

If not, can you please open a new CDETS so we can have this issue resolved, as it makes the product completely useless?

Thank you,

//Eskild

[Darrel May]

I tried to get them to open a case and resolve the issue - I had 10 of the units installed and had to wait nearly 3 months to get most of my money refunded so I could install a product that actually worked. And even when I got the money back they only refunded 9 of the units, left me holding 1 defective unit and a whole bunch of external antennas I had installed with the units. Not to mention the hours of lost labor installing these broken devices and countless hours trying to fix them once they were installed. BAD call on CISCO's part.

[paul.harvey]

Just like to add to this post, we have had the same issue with 6 of these AP541N units. At one point started to question our own competance in setting these units up, (run a compex network with two ASA5500 CSC's Gb Switches, Multilink Routers etc etc) could'nt believe that the Cisco AP's were at fault, but glad to read that we are not the only ones. We had been using them as AP's and Bridges, Clustered and non clustered. Tried all the usual as mentioned in this post but the same issue would keep happenning, the Units would perform OK after a reboot then gradually service became interupted and then no service at all, reboot and again would work for a few hours before eventually no service. NOTHING instant so everytning you tried appeared to work initially but again the AP would stop responding. The MD of the firm decided enough was enough, although a firm Cisco Fan, replaced the items with Ubiquiti Airmax, which worked in our implementation straight away, (what we would have expected from the AP541N units). Now we want Cisco to let us know what we do with 6 x AP541N units that are faulty.

[columbagmbh]

We have two AP541N and were struggling for month until I found this thread. Our whole networking infrastructure consists of Cisco devices and I'm shocked they are still selling a device that's known to be faulty for four years now.

Did you get Cisco to take the APs back? How did you do it?
 

[paul.harvey]

Hi there, yes we got a full refund from Cisco for these units, after an engineer logged in over a remote session to try and get them to work and could not. I believe they are a re-badged Linksys unit. We had to open a Support Case, easiest way is through the Cisco Support Web Chat