At a recent Mikrotik training session I was told that if you lock in lower data rates for the clients the AP will has less potential throughput. It was explained something like this:
Situation A: all customers are connected at 11Mbps so you would have 11 "times to talk" |t|t|t|t|t|t|t|t|t|t|t| so the customer can transmit on any one of the 't" times.
Situation B: all customers have there data rate locked into to 1Mbps so now you would only have 1 "time to talk" | t | but this "time to talk" would have a total duration as long as the 11 section of the 11Mbps so you would have poor overall AP performance.

Hope this made sense, I know throughput speed is slowed down but my question is about AP performance.

This is news to me and would like to make sure if I am interpreting it correctly.

Thanks

My observation about lowing the data rates has(as should) increased the EIRP of the radio card and also a big increase in CCQ and much better performance from the CPE.

Hope this made sense, I know throughput speed is slowed down but my question is about AP performance

The performance of the AP is directly relative to the slowest CPE connected, put another way just one poor performance CPE (for whatever reason) will slow down the performance of that AP, from my understanding the AP will set performance to match the slowest CPE connected,

Situation B: all customers have there data rate locked into to 1Mbps so now you would only have 1 "time to talk" | t | but this "time to talk" would have a total duration as long as the 11 section of the 11Mbps so you would have poor overall AP performance.

You will have a lower overall performance of the network when CPE’s are unable to sustain the max data rates from the AP and while AP + CPE actively switch between rates the network performance will drop
Another classic performance issue is RTS/CTS and hidden node issues, time to talk or Request To Send, Clear To Send configuration is crucial when hidden node issues occur, which effect the performance of the AP when CPE’s simultaneous transmit requests to the AP which cannot process the mixed up requests?

My observation about lowing the data rates has(as should) increased the EIRP of the radio card and also a big increase in CCQ and much better performance from the CPE.

Hope this made sense, I know throughput speed is slowed down but my question is about AP performance

The performance of the AP is directly relative to the slowest CPE connected, put another way just one poor performance CPE (for whatever reason) will slow down the performance of that AP, from my understanding the AP will set performance to match the slowest CPE connected,

Situation B: all customers have there data rate locked into to 1Mbps so now you would only have 1 "time to talk" | t | but this "time to talk" would have a total duration as long as the 11 section of the 11Mbps so you would have poor overall AP performance.

You will have a lower overall performance of the network when CPE’s are unable to sustain the max data rates from the AP and while AP + CPE actively switch between rates the network performance will drop
Another classic performance issue is RTS/CTS and hidden node issues, time to talk or Request To Send, Clear To Send configuration is crucial when hidden node issues occur, which effect the performance of the AP when CPE’s simultaneous transmit requests to the AP which cannot process the mixed up requests?

Bump. Question has come up again in the workplace... "Should we lower all 5G CPE's to 24mbit data rate." I think not but would like to have some more info about manually setting the data rate on all CPE's.

If that is what it takes to get overall CCQ up on that AP, yea.

Better test it under load tho. CCQ varies wildly.

Some links will show good CCQ until loaded, others will show low CCQ until under load.