Tranzeo CPQ’s Hanging

[J.R. Whipple]

We are a small WISP with a mix of AP’s and CPE. Several months ago we started employing some Tranzeo TR-CPQ-19f’s, 15f’s and Nf’s 2.4GHz models. We now have 60 or 70 Tranzeo CPE’s installed. A few of which are hanging, and require a power-down restart to regain functionality.

This seems to be a location dependent problem, in that I have tried several new Tranzeo’s with various antennas at these locations, all with the same results. They will run fine for a few seconds to a few minutes, then hang. When they hang they are inaccessible from either the customer’s computer or the RF side.

None of our other radio types, when used in those same customer locations, seem to suffer this odd hanging behavior. I suspect that Tranzeo has a problem when “seeing” several small desktop AP’s in the signal path to our AP’s.

Yesterday, while pulling a service call at my most recent trouble customer and after resetting the TR-CPQ-15f, it saw seven small and weak AP’s and our much stronger AP. (Our channel 6 AP which is about 2,000-Ft from the customer and visually in the clear, shows up on the Tranzeo with a –54 dB signal level. All but one of the small AP’s are on channels 1, 5, & 11 with signal levels from –83 to –97 dB. One 2wire802 AP is also occupying channel 6 but is –98 dB down. The other customer locations, that are experiencing these problems, also see from five to eight or more of these little “ankle-biter” AP’s.

I have contacted Tranzeo’s tech-support department several times about these problems. They are always polite and seem concerned, but never offer anything that helps. For some time they gave the standard response of “You’re the first person to have this kind of problem”. More recently they have reluctantly admitted, “One or two others might be having a problem like this”. But still – No solutions were forthcoming, other than “try our latest firmware”, which I’ve done.

Any of you out there in wireless land have any problems like this?

[M/Q]

I realize those units have built in antennas, but if I remember right don't you have the option to add an external antenna? I have had a similar issue and the only way I was able to rectify it was to get a parabolic dish or an antenna that had the tightest radiation angle I could. Then move it to a location where even the back and side spill elements of the coverage pattern are not overlapping the problem AP's coverage area.

[J.R. Whipple]

The model TR-CPQ-Nf has an "N" connector and no internal antenna. I've tried the Nf with a 24 dB dish, and a 16 dB yagi, same problem.

The big question is: Why does this only affect the Tranzeo's and none of the other brands of radios?

[M/Q]

Oops, I was thinking of the wrong device. Evidently the antenna approach can not get you out of the coverage of the other network. I am not that well versed in why this device would be affected more so than others. I suspect it has to do with a strange set of circumstances and the hardware/firmware combination being used by this particular device.

We have a really good EE here, you may want to see if Phoenix is available to advise. Or I think they would not be adverse to a PM.

[wifiben]

We are a small WISP with a mix of AP’s and CPE. Several months ago we started employing some Tranzeo TR-CPQ-19f’s, 15f’s and Nf’s 2.4GHz models. We now have 60 or 70 Tranzeo CPE’s installed. A few of which are hanging, and require a power-down restart to regain functionality.

This seems to be a location dependent problem, in that I have tried several new Tranzeo’s with various antennas at these locations, all with the same results. They will run fine for a few seconds to a few minutes, then hang. When they hang they are inaccessible from either the customer’s computer or the RF side.

None of our other radio types, when used in those same customer locations, seem to suffer this odd hanging behavior. I suspect that Tranzeo has a problem when “seeing” several small desktop AP’s in the signal path to our AP’s.

Yesterday, while pulling a service call at my most recent trouble customer and after resetting the TR-CPQ-15f, it saw seven small and weak AP’s and our much stronger AP. (Our channel 6 AP which is about 2,000-Ft from the customer and visually in the clear, shows up on the Tranzeo with a –54 dB signal level. All but one of the small AP’s are on channels 1, 5, & 11 with signal levels from –83 to –97 dB. One 2wire802 AP is also occupying channel 6 but is –98 dB down. The other customer locations, that are experiencing these problems, also see from five to eight or more of these little “ankle-biter” AP’s.

I have contacted Tranzeo’s tech-support department several times about these problems. They are always polite and seem concerned, but never offer anything that helps. For some time they gave the standard response of “You’re the first person to have this kind of problem”. More recently they have reluctantly admitted, “One or two others might be having a problem like this”. But still – No solutions were forthcoming, other than “try our latest firmware”, which I’ve done.

Any of you out there in wireless land have any problems like this?
We got three TR-CPQ-19f units from Electro-Comm in January and had nothing but problems with them. We could not get them to associate with our access points at all (all were Proxim AP-2000s). The CPQs would see the access point in the AP list with more than enough signal but when you would click on the MAC address of the AP it wouldn't associate. I then tried to associate to several nearby wireless routers and still couldn't get the CPQs to work. In the end, the only thing I could get any of the CPQs to associate with were Linksys wireless routers.

You mentioned that Tranzeo acted like you were the first person having these kinds of problems. They said the same thing to me which makes me believe that they know that there are serious issues with the CPQ but they are not wanting to admit to it. They said that there could be compatibility issues with Prism-based radios talking to Atheros-based radios, which is what the CPQ has. I also asked Tranzeo tech support where the "Clone First Packet into Ethernet port" option was and where the Quality (SNR) reading was and they said that those were left out of the CPQ firmware.

Thankfully Electro-Comm let me return all three CPQs and gave me a full credit towards three Prism-based TR-CPE200-19s which have worked flawlessly for us over the past year. The Tranzeo TR-CPE200 series is the only 2.4 GHz CPE that we deploy now and if we need QoS for VoIP in the future then we'll use a VoIP accelerator like the Linksys PAP2-NA which is not locked into using Vonage like the PAP2-CU is.

[skindt]

I too have been having much trouble with the Tranzeo CPQ line as well as thier Tr-6000 series. I cant seem to get any of my cpe-200-xx to connect to the TR6500 access points. They will connect fine to their 4500 access point though. We reported this problem to Tranzeo way back in October of 2005. They insisted that "we were the only one having this problem." "Try our latest firmware." I did try the firmware and it performed exactly the same. After 20 min of uptime on the 6500, we would finally get over 20 associations (cpe's and cpq's) then the 6500 would lock up. We couldnt ping it etc. The only config on it is the html interface.

As for the cpq's, we noticed a bunch of broadcast traffic, spanning tree traffic, and other garbage comming from the cpq radios. We changed the ssid on the radios (basicly disabling them from our network) and our network load dropped 1300%!!!! (used ethereal) We are still trying to settle with Tranzeo on this one.

Has anyone else out there had any isses similar to this?

Feel free to reply or pm me.

[ssbn628]

Hi,
We started putting up some Tranzeo Ap's and have noticed that often we have to go to the tower and reboot them to get them to come online. They seem to work for a day or so and then go down..we can't reach them so we have to drive over and reboot them.. We too have noticed a lot of traffic coming off the Tranzeo CPQ units..Do you have any fixes for this? Tranzeo isn't much help..for the life of me it acts very strange. On one tower we thought maybe the AP was overloaded so we added another with a different SSID..this in turn caused the whole network to be slow..we can ping the AP's in a millsecond..but customers antennas are like 500-1000 ms. Seen this? All the signal levels show great connections but something is wrong. Any ideas?

[jedibaron]

I have had problems getting the Tranzeo 6000 to connect as a bridge to our Smart Bridges Air Point Pros. I have great signal strength and clear line of site but the Tranzeo will not associate. I have found that when the Smart Bridges are set to 1M transmission
rate the radios will not associate. I have also seen the problem of the ping speed increase until the ping ceases and then start over a 4ms and increase again. Thanks to some great minds at Smart Bridges that have doubled the price of radios, I must start incorporating Tranzeos into the system.

[M/Q]

I have noticed the same thing and that they are now offering quite a bit less in the line of equipment. I thought they had some great stuff, difficult to get though.

I also have been moving toward Tranzeo as well as Trango equipment. For the most part is has ben a good move, except for a few threads like this one.

[ssbn628]

We have cleaned up some of our Tranzeo problems. The 6500 series must be set to 18 db for power and all CPQ types must have their power settings as low as possible to acheive a good signal. This will fix a ton of problems. We still have problems with some of the 6500 series locking up but not as often. The new 6600 series have their power at 30 and should be left there. We have also found if we use a set of Tranzeo TR-5A's for PTP links that when the user base builds up it will cause the AP's to lock up. We replaced the links with some Gemini OS links and all was well. The 6500 receive sensivity is almost too good and that is why you have to turn the customer power down. As yet Tranzeo doesn't have a way to lower the sensivity settings on their AP's.

[Socal Telephone]

The company I work for was having a helluva time trying to figure out these CPQ's. We normally install the Tranzeo CPE 200-19's but since they are going to be discontinued we started getting the CPQ's. All kinds of headache and slow speeds and high latencies. What I found out after hours of fooling with stuff was that the AP and all the CPQ's had to be updated to Firmware version 3.3.0. These are 2 seperate files so make sure you apply the appropriate firmware to the right device. I applied most of the clients remotely with horrible latencies. Once this was complete the latencies were still horrible. I changed the output of the AP from 23dbm to 18dbm and bang most of the high latencies dissappeared. I had to do some final tweaking of settings to get it where I wanted it to be. I made adjustments to certain clients RTS/CTS settings those that could be causing a hidden node problem. Dropped them from the factory setting of 2346 to 500. Helped the latencies even more. Finally those customers that were still experiencing some packet loss I adjusted the Fragmentation threshold to 700 and it helped them. For the most part patching the firmwares and turning the output power at the AP down fixed 95% of the problem. The RTS/CTS settings fixed about 2% and the Fragmentation threshold was about 1%. The latencies went from 500ms - 4000ms down to about 7ms - 25ms avg. Also I had only 12 clients on this AP and 4 of them were the older CPE's which need firmware build 77. To update older CPQ's sometimes you will need to flash build 85r before you can flash version 3.3.0. I hope this helps some of you. The QoS info from the CPQ's really comes in handy for troubleshooting.:)

[cybermx]

i have like 200 tranzeos installed CPQ and CPE and it happend it happend sometimes.. but mostly i had problems with the routers i selled.. anyway the point is that all my ap's are using Prism radios 200mw minipci and happens sometime that the radio (tranzeo) stop responding.. and with a restart works again without any problem, another issue i have been experimenting is that onces the radio is connected to the ap.. is hard to get the config web page.. even with the CPE locator Tool.. i was thinking if you have the same problem because in tranzeo told me that, this happends with the Prism radios vs tranzeos...

Thanks for your time..

Sorry about my english.. and hope to get an answer.

Cy..

[usdol]

What Type of AP are you using?