Wifi 6e Question

T

The Cobra

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SO we are a test site for Sophos at my school where I serve as IT Admin as well as teach computer sci. We have been testing the new 420AP-6e (two of them) The company gave them to us to keep. They also donated two brand new ones to the school as well since the two test units were no longer supported. The 420ap's don't have all of their features fully active and will update over the next 6 months to one year. They do have basic features ready to go such as connection and fully cloud enabled.

This is how I currently have it rigged. Seems to get great coverage around the house. But not seeing any big speed diffs on my 6e devices (ipad pro w/6e) and lenovo WS Laptop with AX chipset on it. Getting around 750mb. Older devices act just as fine as before. Any suggestion on channel setup tp produce faster speeds? All other aspects of wifi are great.

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Are you testing simultaneously or one at a time? A quick read says wifi 6 is more about increasing total network speed than for any one client (although it does bring improved encoding to 2.4 GHz which ac didn't, so you might see a significant improvement when your wifi6 devices are too far out for 5/6 GHz)
 
toast0 said:
Are you testing simultaneously or one at a time? A quick read says wifi 6 is more about increasing total network speed than for any one client (although it does bring improved encoding to 2.4 GHz which ac didn't, so you might see a significant improvement when your wifi6 devices are too far out for 5/6 GHz)
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I have one AP at one end of the house and the other AP at the other end of the house both connected via cat 6e ethernet that goes into a 2.5 switch and then intoi a 2.5gb firewall. Just don't know much about wifi 6.
 
I think most vendors use the best possible speeds, with no over head of 100 other houses and their devices around. I got a Ubiquiti U6 in wall and it promises some wicked speeds, but even 5ft away from it I get no where near the max I should from my devices, testing with iperf and speed sites (1Gb/1Gb fiber at home), kind of annoying.
 
What's the channel width? I would make sure it's set to at least 80mhz on 6ghz.

Keep in mind that your client devices may be limited depending on the number of antennas and number of supported streams. Most consumer oriented WiFi chipsets are only 2x2.

Is the 6ghz SSID set to WPA3? This is a minimum requirement. If you don't have it set to WPA3, the AP may not even be broadcasting it on the 6ghz band. Currently we have to run a dual-SSID configuration in production for our 6ghz sites due to this minimum requirement and maintaining support for older devices that don't support WPA3.
 
You'll want to ideally connect them to 2.5GbE rather than 1GbE since they support it.

As far as channels go, you can use a program like Network Analyzer on Android to determine the channel with the least overlap/interference. I know TP-Link Omada and Ubiquiti Unifi controllers can channel scan too but I'm not sure about Sophos. This is more important for Wireless N but could potentially slightly help for AC / AX channels. You can also experiment with 160MHz channel width for AC / AX, but it can be dependent on location since you'll be using DFS channels. Like ComputerBox34 said at least 80MHz for sure though.
 
ComputerBox34 said:
What's the channel width? I would make sure it's set to at least 80mhz on 6ghz.

Keep in mind that your client devices may be limited depending on the number of antennas and number of supported streams. Most consumer oriented WiFi chipsets are only 2x2.

Is the 6ghz SSID set to WPA3? This is a minimum requirement. If you don't have it set to WPA3, the AP may not even be broadcasting it on the 6ghz band. Currently we have to run a dual-SSID configuration in production for our 6ghz sites due to this minimum requirement and maintaining support for older devices that don't support WPA3.
Click to expand...

80mhz sure if you are with in a few feet of the AP, but you also have potential for more channel cross over depending how dense of an area they live in?. Most AP's are decent these days at choosing the best channel, which is often the same as those around them, unless they are overly congesting. Using ranges different than those around can actually cause more interference and issues due to cross channel talk on the upper and lower ranges of 40/80.

Or is it less likely most around them would be using 80 as they are likely on 40/20 auto settings most routers do these days?
 
MrGuvernment said:
80mhz sure if you are with in a few feet of the AP, but you also have potential for more channel cross over depending how dense of an area they live in?. Most AP's are decent these days at choosing the best channel, which is often the same as those around them, unless they are overly congesting. Using ranges different than those around can actually cause more interference and issues due to cross channel talk on the upper and lower ranges of 40/80.

Or is it less likely most around them would be using 80 as they are likely on 40/20 auto settings most routers do these days?
Click to expand...
There are 14 useable channels in 6ghz at 80mhz width. No DFS either. Should be more than fine in a residential area, especially considering 6ghz doesn't propagate as far as 5ghz.
 
Good to know. I know back a few years ago, everyone going off and selecting their own channels like 3, or 5 and such on the 2.4G range just made it worse for everyone due to cross talk....
 
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