We are switching from StarOS over to Mikrotik. Currently on our StarOS ap's the Mirkotik 411 seems to be working great for most users. A few users are getting dropped connections though as the MT re associates to the tower. If I look in the system log I see it say "lost connection, extensive data loss". When I run ping test on the connection it looks perfect. Customer is also able to get full package speeds. Not sure where the data loss is coming from. All clients MT clients do this at the same time. The old clients of StarOS all stay running and never notice anything. Was curious if anyone else has had this kind of issue. If you would like any details on the setup let me know and I can provide you with anything that may help. I have already tried channels but that does not seem to fix this problem.

The link is disconnecting and reconnecting immediately which is the reason the clients has not notices anything.

Try improving the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the links but if it is good enough, then the only thing responsible is interference. If you are using free Frequency (2.4) note that it has a lot of interference issue ranging from environmental activities (ovum, industrial activity, trees etc) to other transmitting devices like radios operating on that frequency range.

Different radios have different tolerance to interference, so if you try every thing suggested and no solutions, try using one of the Star radio and see the result interms of stability.

Finally, posing the configuration might help us look into your setup, I only assumed that since you have some working perfectly, you may have tried the same configuration on the not working ones which should be the first thing to have been done on ur own. If you have, fine else do that.

Get back for us to know if this help or if you need more help!

If we put in a StarOS at the same location it works perfectly. The signals for Mirkotiks having the issues are around a -70 db for 2.4. With the StarOS we set out limit to a -75 for client side signal. AP's signal for these customers are normally around a -74 if they have a -70 on client. All the configs match and I will get a copy to post up here. Channels do not show anything and a lot of these customers have been on our service for years with no problems. We live in a area with a lot of storms and Lightning does not play well with them. I was just not sure if the MT is just more sensitive to the noise and the StarOS was just able to deal with it better. Let me post config and see what you think.

Here is the configs we put into the Clients

/interface wireless set wlan1 mode=station
/ip dhcp-client add add-default-route=yes default-route-distance=0 disabled=no interface=wlan1 use-peer-dns=yes use-peer-ntp=yes
/ip pool add name=dhcp_pool1 ranges=192.168.96.101-192.168.96.254
/ip dhcp-server add address-pool=dhcp_pool1 authoritative=after-2sec-delay bootp-support=static disabled=no interface=ether1 lease-time=3d name=dhcp1
/ip dhcp-server config set store-leases-disk=5m
/ip dhcp-server network add address=192.168.96.0/24 dns-server=72.11.0.21,72.11.31.21 gateway=192.168.96.1
/ip firewall nat add action=masquerade chain=srcnat disabled=no out-interface=wlan1


The only other settings we change is the security and ssid. We are using Wep per having some old clients that will only except that. The tower is in a b/g Mixed mode and will accept either. Client has been tried in B and G only modes but does not make any difference.

make sure you have noise imunity turned on and set hardware retries from the default of 4 to 6-10 range.
This should stabalize most users.

It will also double or triple your latencies or worse on your whole access point.

I have turn on the noise imunity for client side and changed the Hardware Retries to 10 to see what happens. Will post with update on how its working.

What wireless card do you use?

We use MikroTik R2n cards



I have tried the hw. Retries and the noise noise imunity but did not see much of any difference on it. I did however find a way to make it work by forcing the clients to G only mode. We have our clients set to G only but they would still use B rates from time to time. I went into the advanced config and took out all the be rates with a manual config and they seem to be working very well for last week now. We no longer have the drops. Doing this increases the time it takes to associate to the tower though. Some clients now take up to 20 minutes to connect after a reboot but when they come online they look and perform great now. I just had a customer with a -55 signal client side and -60 on tower that I had to do this to in order to get them running correctly. The firmware versions I have tried are the 4.10,4.11, and 5.0Beta6. The Beta firmware has been the best so far with forcing to G only.


If anyone else has any other recommendations that would be great. But as of right now forcing the equipment into G has fixed our issues.