Hi All,
We have been installing Turris Omnias for customers for years, but recently we received several reports of Wi-Fi issues.
These issues have forced us to replace several Omnias in production with closed source hardware and also to suspend all Turris installs until the issues can be resolved.
Our experience with the Turris Wi-Fi over time…
3.x (early versions) - industry leading reliability with no connectivity failures on any band
3.x (more recent versions) + 4.x (more recent versions) - frequent 5GHz connectivity failures
4.x (latest version) - no 5Ghz connectivity failures (which is great!) but frequent 2GHz connectivity failures
When the connectivity failures occur the Wi-Fi status indicator on the endpoint will still show as ‘Connected’ but with a status of ‘no Internet’.
While in this state attempts to ping the Omnia will return a result of ‘unreachable’.
Disconnecting then reconnecting will briefly allow traffic to flow again, but the failure quickly returns.
Power cycling the Omnia will resolve the issue for a day or so, then the failure returns.
I tested numerous Omnias before identifying these issues were software related rather than hardware failures.
The issue is similar to this:
After some research I manually switched an Omnia running 4.0.5 to the Candela Technologies Wi-Fi driver with the terminal commands shared by ‘Taz’ here:
The result was an immediate improvement in 2GHz stability.
Since making this change the experience is comparable to the early versions of 3.x where Wi-Fi was incredibly reliable.
This experience is corroborated by several other users recently here:
We also spotted the feature request to allow users to manually switch via the web interface rather than via terminal commands:
All of this leads to some questions…
1 - was the early 3.x firmware using the Candela Technologies Wi-Fi driver and was this changed at some point to the OEM Wi-Fi driver?
2 - will automatic updates (for example 4.0.5 → 4.0.6) revert a Turris manually configured with the the Candela Technologies Wi-Fi driver back to the OEM Wi-Fi driver?
3 - why is the project not shipping the Candela Technologies Wi-Fi driver by default if it is so much more reliable?
I also identified that the early 3.x medkit we used to prep the Omnias defaulted the auto update feature to off.
Customers that received those Omnias have not reported any Wi-Fi issues, but it is because they were not auto updating as expected.
While this is bad since they are not receiving updates, at least the Wi-Fi is stable until a manual upgrade to Turris OS can be completed.
As poster ‘mh182’ mentioned here ‘A wireless router with unstable wireless connection is like a car without an engine’!
Our request is for the team to make restoring Wi-Fi stability the top priority.
Over time the project has decided to add many ‘bells and whistles’ but nothing is more important to our shared customers than Wi-Fi reliability and performance.
Thanks to everyone with the Turris team.
We look forward to hearing a status update on Wi-Fi stability that will allow us to resume Turris installs for customers.
We are also hopeful that the project can converge on a stable build of Turris OS 5.x OpenWrt 19.07 and the legacy 3.x and 4.x branches can be retired.