Encryption & WiFi Speeds – AES vs TKIP

Useful Terms – Symmetric Speeds | Ubiquiti | Access Point (AP) | AES | TKIP | Quality of Service (QOS)

One of the first tasks I was given at my first job was to resolve a WiFi experience issue several if not all employees reported. Essentially at a company of 60+ employees, WiFi devices were receiving maximum speeds of 50Mbps even though their contract with TimeWarner was for a dedicated business line of 100Mbps symmetric. At that time (mid 2017) my employers WiFi was built on Ubiquiti devices managed though their proprietary UniFi Cloudkey. They had several 802.11ac access points deployed, which Ubiquiti claimed are able to handle a maximum theoretical connection of up to 7 Gbps.

I dove headfirst into this task and tried the following:

  1. Digging into our CloudKey settings to check for any ‘QOS’ or ‘Bandwidth Limit’ rules.
  2. Monitoring bandwidth consumption over the week for anomalies.
  3. Reaching out to Ubiquiti (who only provides support via email) to verify if devices are healthy.
  4. Reaching out to TimeWarner to verify speeds on their end.

After attempting to resolve this issue to the best of my knowledge at that time (to no success) I ultimately decided to report the task a failure. Fortunately before sending my report to my superiors I decided to go through the WiFi Security page on the Ubiquiti CloudKey one last time. This time I spotted a notification which stated that “Using antiquated encryption standards like TKIP can severely reduce the wireless network performance” and that AES was strongly recommended in order to take advantage of modern WiFi capabilities. As a final hailmary I replaced theirTKIP encryption with AES and was pleasantly surprised when WiFi capable devices began receiving much higher speeds (close to if not over 100Mbps)

Needless to say employees were grateful that this problem was resolved. The only drawback of switching WiFi encryption was that all WiFi devices had to re-authenticate with the network.

This being my fist task taught me two very important lessons:

  1. Not every IT related problem that causes network wide issues has to be complex in nature (till this day restarting workstations manages to solve a majority of reported issues).
  2. Even though encryption algorithms can run several times in mere seconds. Using antiquated standards like TKIP instead of AES can result in noticeable ripple affects.

Additional Sources – https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/use-aes-tkip-faster-wi-fi-network/