Question: I have a single-story house with two ceiling-mounted EAP610s inside and another one in a detached garage. They’re connected through PoE switches and managed by an OC200 controller.
The network works well almost everywhere, except for one very specific area in the bedroom — basically one side of the bed. YouTube starts buffering there, video calls occasionally freeze, and websites sometimes take several seconds to load. The connection never fully drops, but the WiFi indicator keeps moving between medium and full strength.
There’s an indoor AP in the hallway less than 20 feet away, so I wouldn’t expect the signal to be weak. The other indoor AP is farther away across the house, and the garage AP can also be detected from the bedroom. I can reproduce the issue on both my phone and laptop, while wired devices remain completely stable.
I’m not sure whether this is caused by weak signal in that exact spot, too much overlap between the APs, channel interference, or some kind of local noise source. I don’t want to start randomly changing transmit power and roaming settings without knowing what the actual problem is.
What would be the best way to measure what each AP is doing around the bedroom and narrow down the cause?
This is a good use case for a small NetSpot survey
Map just the bedroom and hallway, then look at the signal from each EAP separately by BSSID. Check:
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which AP is strongest at the bed;
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how close the secondary signal is;
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whether SIR drops in that exact spot;
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whether the APs are using overlapping channels;
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whether an active speed test also falls apart there.
You may find that the hallway AP has decent RSSI, but another EAP on the same or an overlapping channel is almost as strong. Or the signal may be reflecting strangely around the bed and dropping much lower than the phone’s bars suggest.
Since it happens on both the phone and laptop, I wouldn’t blame roaming alone. First test whether the problem follows the location or the AP.
@Fair-Algae-3150 I ran a quick survey. The hallway EAP is around −61 dBm on my side of the bed, but the other indoor EAP is only about 6–8 dB weaker there. SIR also looks noticeably worse in that corner.
Both indoor APs are currently using 80 MHz channels on 5 GHz.
There’s your first thing to test. Two APs only 6 dB apart can create a messy overlap zone, especially with 80 MHz channels. Try putting them on separate non-overlapping channels and temporarily reduce both to 40 MHz. Don’t touch every roaming setting yet. Fix the RF layout first, then see whether roaming still behaves badly.
I moved the APs onto separate channels, changed 5 GHz to 40 MHz, and lowered the farther EAP from high to medium power. The NetSpot survey now shows the hallway AP about 14 dB stronger at the bed, and SIR is much better there. I’ve tested YouTube and a video call for about an hour with no buffering. Looks like the APs were overlapping too heavily in that one area. Thanks, everyone.