Hi RWB, customers have to login to their wifi router and enforce 20Mhz bandwidth.
Two ways this happens:
- A proper ‘bandwidth’ setting in the wifi router. Called a few things but I suggest to customers to look for a bandwidth setting that typically has options such as ‘20Mhz’, ‘40Mhz’ and ‘auto’. The last is effectively 40Mhz with fallback to spec, more on that soon.
- A speed setting. Some brands use 150mbps / 300 / 450 to infer what bandwidth is being chosen. 150Mbps is the safe 1 20mhz bandwidth setting.
The underlying issue is 40Mhz bandwidth is actually 2 adjoining full width wireless channels (ie 1 & 6) being used together to logically double throughput. Google yielded this article with some nice analysis shots if you’re more curious. https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-features/31743-bye-bye-40-mhz-mode-in-24-ghz-part-1
The issue with that is the poor ol’ Particle doesn’t understand 40mhz so once the conversation drifts out of the correct channel the Particle is effectively dropped out and starts its reconnection again and sometimes this doesn’t work because the AP is still happily talking throughout the wider 2 channels. One thing I did pickup from the above particular article is its reference to how clients could potentially have a " ‘fat channel’ intolerant bit set". I’m guessing the Particle fails to do this because it’s a very old wifi stack or incomplete, or as this (https://prettyflyforwifi.net/2017/03/17/40-mhz-intolerant-a-wastefully-good-feature/) article suggests, the soho style wifi routers simply ignore it
Try explaining that to someone who normally gets their kids ‘to configure the tv & internet’, and try explaining “that’s just the way things are” to people who actually know what they’re talking about and wondering why your product is using 1990’s wifi. You either end up with 1-3 hours consumed in supporting a single customer setting up a remote support session as they inevitably need to workout how to install teamviewer and get their actual wifi router password.
This issue is just getting worse as most of my customers are Australian or NZ. We’ve had a national broadband project called NBN running for the past 6 years or so, and while its a travesty akin to building a mexican wall (you literally get 100x better internet from a rice paddy farm in vietnam than here, pretty much only Brazil is worse), the main outcome is folk have received new fancy wifi routers. They generally default to 40mhz bandwidth because thats how you make Facebook and the playstation go faster 