MR 32 Poor wireless preformance

[Joe2]

I have 40 MR32s deployed in a school with one AP in each classroom. We have 90% Dell Chromebooks and 10% Windows and Ipads devices. Since several teachers are now live streaming their classes, we have gotten several complaints about connections dropping and slow throughput. I have contacted support and they downgraded the firmware to  25.11. Since then, we are still getting complaints. As a test, I install a Ubiquiti Nano HD in one of the classrooms and we instantly noticed an improvement. in fact, the AP had about 40 clients connected to it as devices in nearby classrooms were preferring the connection the unifi AP offered.  Is anyone else experiencing such poor performance with the MR32? I have a similar deployment in another school using MR34s with zero complaints.

[Bruce]

There's so many factors that it could be, that its hard to say what the cause is. The Ubiquiti access point you tried is a 802.11ac Wave 2 4x4 device, whereas the MR32 is a 802.11ac Wave 1 2x2 device, so it is possible this is purely a bandwidth issue, and based on that you need to upgrade the MR32 to take advantage of more up to date technology. Likewise, the MR34 is a 3x3 device, so will give greater throughput, but being on a different site its hard to compare directly as there may well be other factors at play, e.g. density, construction/walls, interference.

[NolanHerring]

What firmware version were you running before you downgraded to 25.11?

There are a ton of variables with a setup like this and it's difficult to pinpoint the exact issue. Its very possible that the AutoRF is not running optimal channels, so you could have AP's near enough that are on the same frequency, which means that you really only have a single cell instead of two cells. MR32's don't support RX-SOP unfortunately, so that's a shame. 

If you can, try setting up a static power and channel plan on a portion of the building or wherever your getting complaints. Also I'm assuming the SSID the teachers are using is 5GHz only?