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I have been upgrading my remote towers to the new Airmax Prism AC Gen 2 access points and our back haul from Nanobridge to AirFiber 5x.

Today at one of our remote sites we installed first a Prism AC Gen 2 AP, this took the place of Rocket M5 and then a Air Fiber 5 X, taking the place of a Nanobridge M5.

Neither of these devices will link at 1 gig with the switch, The switch is a Netonix Switch 8 port model WS-8-150-DC.

I wanted to prove out a few things so I tried the following:

We can take the UBNT power packs included with the devices hook these to the tough cable going up the tower then patch them into a laptop and get and keep gigabit, works as it should. Once they are moved from the laptop port to the switch port they come up and down three times as gigabit then revert to 100 mbps on the switch. I have tried with POE ON not using the UBNT powers packs and POE off using the power packs. Same results both ways. Only way to keep gigabit is to plug into laptop.

It is odd that this happens when only connected to the switch.

This site includes other RF equipment 2 way radios by Motorola. Their is also a paging station setup here.

Any thoughts?

Did you test the port in question by turning off POE and using your laptop in that port to see if you could get 1G connection from switch to laptop?

Did you try the AFX radio in another switch port?

Did you try different cables? A badly crimped cable can work in one jack and fail in another.

I did try different ports same results. It is the same symptoms on the Prism AP and the Airfiber 5x . The port in question does link at 1 gig with my laptop with POE off.

With the UBNT POE Power Pack and a 6 foot premade jumper to my laptop I get 1 gig with the cable on the tower.

I have tested with my fluke meter and re crimped the cable on both ends.

Are the tower ground rods bonded to the electrical system ground rods with a heavy cable?

Also check the electrical service ground rods that there are more than 1, tight in ground, and no corrosion and consider adding another rod and bonding to existing rods.

Excessive ground current running across the Ethernet Cables can cause issues.

Are you using Ethernet surge protectors and if so remove them.

No ethernet surge protectors I am going tomorrow at add more grounding. I will post back and let you know if that resolves the issue. I had issues like this before with another site and I had to end up putting a wisp switch mini closer to the devices up on the tower.

Make sure tower ground rods are bonded to the electrical service ground rods. - IMPORTANT

Adding another 1 or 2 electrical service ground rods and cleaning up any corrosion is always a good thing. - IMPORTANT

QUESTION: Is this tower or the other tower you're talking about also radio broadcasting antennas?

The tower we are talking about here is a two way radio tower for the local government. Licensed band Motorola analog 2 way 450 ish mhz. I added an additional heavy ground and two additional ground rods today, these were all bonded to the existing electrical panel ground system, which is new also.

I found out today their is also a Ham radio repeater here, not sure if that matters or not.

Still not able to hold 1 gig links, the radio does the same cycle, on and off three times at 1 gig, green port flashes, then comes to rest at 100 mbps, yellow port indication on the forth cycle. Same for both devices at this site. Air Fiber 5x and Prism 5g Gen2, both new out of the box.


The other site that had the issues I mention before has an am transmitter right next door. Cat 7a shielded cables and shorter runs into the mid span wisp switch mini 6 resolved that issue. Something else I will mention about this other site. Communication between the wisp switch mini mid span and the main switch in the radio shack WS 12 250 DC holds 1 gig between the switches when the ubnt radio would not.