I work for a grocery store chain that also runs fuel stations at some of their stores. Most of these run a fiber connection to the store but there are a couple one off stores that connect via a wireless bridge/antenna.
One of these stores is in Montana where the smoke is pretty heavy due to the fires right now. The connection till now, while slow (with or without smoke), has been functional. On the night of 9/16 they did a network upgrade and replaced the basic cisco bridge and catalyst switch with a Merakai switch and similar bridge. The new bridge is an Aironet Antenna ANT2588, With an AP1562E outdoor AP. (I'm trying to find the model of the old one).
The connection to the fuel station seemed OK for the first few hours and then dropped completely. Tons of packet loss to the point that the Meraki switch in the fuel station showed no connection for a few hours. It then would bounce between connected and not connected. This started around 1pm MST and continued to around 10pm that night after the fuel station closed. Shortly after that, the connection seemed to stabilize and the register was able to finish booting up. I ran a ping test on the equipment overnight to monitor the speeds. They are around 200ms which, sadly, is the norm for this. I thought we were in the clear but around 7am when the fuel station opened, ping times spikes to 900-1300ms and a fair amount of lost pings. The register functions but with massive delays in response.
Cisco believes the smoke in the air could be the issue due to all the particles in the air but it wasn't a problem on the old antenna. My boss is leaning towards it not being the smoke. I'm not sure on either right now. I find it odd that it stabilized once the fuel station closed (running the pumps on card transactions only) and then spiked again once it opened. Any thoughts on this either way?
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