Wifi6 Performance

JSolo

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Got me some new wifi.

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Details;
  • intel ax200 included with motherboard, using included 2x2 antenna
  • mt7921 - netgear a8000 usb nic. Connected to same pc
  • Test PC is roughly 25' from AP, going through 2 walls
  • AP is TPlink EAP670 (4x4 160mhz capable). Ap mounted ~18" below ceiling in a central portion of rectangular house
  • AP wired to server using gigabit switch
  • AP is using 160mhz channel with ch 100 (dfs) set as base
  • iperf3 running on truenas instance under proxmox with 1 nic of intel I340-t4 quad nic card in passthrough to vm
  • Testing done with no other 5ghz clients
  • Drivers for both are most current available as of this posting (20231123)
 
Nice peak power increase on the dyno charts.
 
It gets better. Wired to a 2.5gb port, same client location. I've seen it get as high as 1.3gbps.

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Amz had some cheap 2.5gb switches on sale. I picked up 2 as I have a few 2.5gb devices. From what i've been reading, the right solution is to go to 10gb using sfp. This is costlier than what I want to spend now. That and I don't exactly have a need for 10gb (yet).

Thoughts?
 
I've been pretty happy with our TP-Link AX11000. Picked it up on sale at Costco. Wifi speed depends a lot on distance and whether it has clear line-of-sight, but it can easily beat my home copper.

Realistically though, the speed is only relevant when I am hitting my home NAS. My home internet connection is considerably slower.
 
From interior to exterior to high performance - everything you need for your Stinger awaits you...
@Volfy I don't think I could ever go back to a consumer router. It's like going to an automatic after driving manual all your life :) . I'm too spoiled by all the knobs UTM (sophos) and soon to be pfsense offers.

I suppose until my nas use increases significantly, 1/2.5gb will be sufficient. For now it's used mainly as a repository to daily dump changed "my documents" type files from several machines (using syncthing one way sync), and for streaming media.

Highest bluray 4k bitrate (100GB disk) of 144 mbps (per Ultra HD Blu-ray - Wikipedia) hardly comes close to saturating gigabit. 8K video would still have plenty of bw for a single stream. Better compression schemes will surely reduce this too.

To date we don't have any 4k panels in the house other than computer monitors. My samdung tv from 2013 is still working fine. Hard to justify replacement. In fact even the wifi was working fine. I wanted excellent network performance in an area not wired, thus the new AP supporting 160mhz and AX. It (wifi) now comes close to saturating the fiber gigabit connection.
 
I briefly flirted with the idea of going to 6E but no one complains about the 5GHz in the house, and as an IT guy I just don't want complaining.

And I'd want to replace all of them which would cost me about $1000.

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@JSolo Our house was build back in 2002 prior to proliferation of flat panels, so it has a sunken in TV nook that limits me width-wise to the 65" we have now. For that size panel, at 12-15' viewing distance, 1080p is already far finer than retina resolution. Besides, for movie experience, I actually value sound quality more than the visual impact of a big flat panel. Since most 1080p Bluray movies already have soundtrack in lossless formats like DTS Master and Dolby TrueHD, going to 4k doesn't offer much soundtrack improvement, if any. As long as my Onkyo A/V receiver still trucks along nicely, It's hard to throw the whole kit-n-caboodle away just to accommodate 4k.

Also, for the longest time, since Xfinity took over Time Warner, they'd capped my "unlimited" Earthlink internet contract to about 70mbps. They justified it on the grounds that 70mbps was supposedly the tech limit back then. Well, for $39+Tax /month, I really couldn't complain too much. It was actually fast enough for most of what we needed any way. Curiously, earlier this year, Xfinity upgraded my service to 800mbps - out-of-the-blue, no strings attached. My guess is they are feeling pressure from T-Mobile and other wireless ISPs and fear I might jump ship. A $40 contract might not be much to them, but it is nonetheless a nice steady revenue.

Regardless, even at up to 800 mbps, my home LAN is still far from being the bottleneck. I actually upgraded to 802.11ax mostly for OFDMA and OBSS, which allows all the new IOT devices I'm constantly adding (smart switches, security cams, thermostats, etc.) to communicate more efficiently. TP-Link's control app also lets me do just about all the administrative tasks I want out of a home router.

You know... it's a lot like choosing the right Stinger. 3.3T's bigger numbers are impressive, but the 2.5T does what I need done just fine. :)
 
I can't find any settings or information pertaining to OBSS for the eap670. How does this work - if it detects interfering wifi signals, it reduces channel width? As for OFDMA, this requires client support as well.

I'm confused, given the enterprise level devices you're using above, what are you doing with the ax11000?
 
I can't find any settings or information pertaining to OBSS for the eap670. How does this work - if it detects interfering wifi signals, it reduces channel width? As for OFDMA, this requires client support as well.

I'm confused, given the enterprise level devices you're using above, what are you doing with the ax11000?
My understanding of BSS coloring is that it has to do with more efficient use of multiple access points with overlapping channels. I'm not sure that's something that I had to enable specifically. AX11000 actually has 3 separate access points built in - two 5Ghz and one 2.4Ghz. I had the option of setting them up as distinctly separate access points that clients can choose specifically which to hook up. Or... I could combine them into a single "virtual" access point, in which case AX11000 decides how best to allocate its clients across the available AP channels. So perhaps that was enabling it. I could be off base on this, but this feature of auto optimization of multiple APs is certainly well worth the upgrade.

As for OFDMA, in our household, we currently have up to 6 cellphones and 4 tablets that are Wifi6 capable. Several of them specifically stated OFDMA support. Also, IIRC, the last 2 motherboards that I upgraded also have Wifi6 built-in. In the AX11000 Tether app (or web browser app), there is an explicit setting for enabling OFDMA. I've tried both settings, and with it enabled seems to yield more stable network comms and less dropouts and such. Although... I did notice - on average - a slight drop in Wifi max speed with it enabled. From what I have read and the my limited understanding on what OFDMA does, that is not unexpected. As I mentioned above, my home LAN max throughput is of little concern to me, as the real straw sucking is through my ISP.

I doubt any of the other smaller devices on our home network are AX- and OFDMA- enabled, and I don't expect them to be. Perhaps in time more IOT stuff will be... I hope.

As for my two NAS, both are on copper. The main one is on link aggregation with two gigabit ports, so no point getting them on wifi6... and I wouldn't want to anyway, for security reasons.

I don't really consider what I do with my home LAN to be enterprise level. I'm not running any cloud servers, business portals, SQL databases, or any other services that I would traditional associate with enterprise computing. There was a time when I liked to toy a bit with stuff like that at home. For quite a while, I built my own NAS by repurposing an old tower PC loaded with 4 HDDs, running on Windows Server 2008 R2. That was only because back then, OTS home NAS sucked balls, and business NAS were super expensive. These days, commercially available NAS has gotten quite good and relatively inexpensive, and are far more efficient and better packaged than I could ever muster. There is little incentive to roll my own joint. These days, I'd rather buy off-the-shelf as much as possible and mess with as little admin stuff as I can get away with.

Sometimes, good enough is just that... good enough.
 
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From interior to exterior to high performance - everything you need for your Stinger awaits you...
^^I'm still confused. Where do the 4 unifi ap's fit in relative the ax11000?
 
OMG! I have no idea how I missed that! Going blind in my old age.
 
/ waves at @JSolo

I'm the one with Unifi
That's a pretty serious setup you got. Looks like you've got a good wide spread across your property.

I find that I only need an additional AP for my detached garage. The AX11000's antenna array covers my house well enough. Wifi speed at far corners, going thru multiple walls can drop off a good bit, but not too far below the typical ISP speed we get, so it's serviceable. Like 5G, these 5GHz links really like line of sight.
 
I can use one AP for inside my house, but it is brick and the signal attenuates too drastically to even use it on the back porch. I could probably get away with the yard AP for the garage because it is wood, but I was never able to get coverage in the shed without an AP in there.
 
From interior to exterior to high performance - everything you need for your Stinger awaits you...
I'm still impressed with the eap670 range. Was testing outside with my oneplus 7t, ~100-125' away from AP. Still able to get ~50 mbps down, ~30 mbps up on 5ghz. Slower on 2.4.
 
In reference to post #3, it gets even better.

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This is literally 1 floor below the AP, maybe slightly to the side. Test using iperf3, running to my windows box which has a rtl8125B nic. Upload was around 1Gbps.
 
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