About Wifi 6E channels and ZenWifi Pro ET12

[Qutrit]

Hello!

I am used to setting fixed control channels in my setup for better optimization of the signals. However now that I have a Wifi 6E router I am a bit stumped about the difference between the different channels and whether there are advantages and disadvantages of some of them with respect to othgers. I have had it in auto for the 6ghz channels but I see that I the channels ahve changed twice in a couple of reboots and I wonder why since I am the only wifi 6E network in my environment for now.

Is there any advice about setting up a fixed control channel for Wifi 6E? and if so are the arny advantages of some channels over others? I have been searching a bit on the forum but haven't found a response to this yet. I am currently on channel 85 and Wifi 6E devices are faster than gigabit, saturating my ISP speed, so very happy about this, but I want to learn a bit more about channel selection.

Thanks!

 

[tgl]

Unless you have a wifi scanner that can scan the 6E spectrum, you're better off letting the router do what it wants. It can "see" whether there is interference on a particular channel, and you can't.

(Where the interference is coming from, who knows? But this spectrum wasn't empty before the FCC reallocated it to wifi. Maybe there's some low-level signal from a legacy use-case in your area. Or it could just be random noise.)

FWIW, I had some unfortunate results in preliminary experiments with an ASUS ET8: about half the time, after a reboot it defaulted to a 20MHz channel in the 6E band. I have no idea why, because I'm pretty sure that none of my neighbors have 6E service yet ... and signal penetration seemed bad enough that it shouldn't matter much if they do. But that's what I saw. I fixed it by locking it to 160MHz channel width in that band, but I still left the specific channel choice on "auto". The latest firmware for the ET8 is still 386.49873, and with luck this weirdness will be fixed in future updates, but it seems to be something to keep an eye on.

 

[Qutrit]

Unless you have a wifi scanner that can scan the 6E spectrum, you're better off letting the router do what it wants. It can "see" whether there is interference on a particular channel, and you can't.

(Where the interference is coming from, who knows? But this spectrum wasn't empty before the FCC reallocated it to wifi. Maybe there's some low-level signal from a legacy use-case in your area. Or it could just be random noise.)

FWIW, I had some unfortunate results in preliminary experiments with an ASUS ET8: about half the time, after a reboot it defaulted to a 20MHz channel in the 6E band. I have no idea why, because I'm pretty sure that none of my neighbors have 6E service yet ... and signal penetration seemed bad enough that it shouldn't matter much if they do. But that's what I saw. I fixed it by locking it to 160MHz channel width in that band, but I still left the specific channel choice on "auto". The latest firmware for the ET8 is still 386.49873, and with luck this weirdness will be fixed in future updates, but it seems to be something to keep an eye on.

Thanks for this. Do you know how to tell if the channel they are connected is a 160Mhz width one? Do you sue a spectrum analyzer? IN my case, even forcing the bandwidth to be 160 Mhz I get 117 as the control channel, but I know I'm still getting 160 Mhz because of the throughput. is there any way to see if this is the case?

 

[tgl]

Do you know how to tell if the channel they are connected is a 160Mhz width one?

IIRC, the router's "Wireless Log" screen shows the control channel and bandwidth. Also, I was testing with a Mac client, on which option-clicking the wireless menu bar item pulls down a lot of useful details like channel and bandwidth. There's probably an equivalent thing on Windows but I don't know it.

 

[lamp]

@tgl is correct, you can use the router's "Wireless Log" to display the control channel and BW.
See below, in my case, my ET8 is using control channels 37 and 160Mhz on 6Ghz. You can also click "Display Low Level Details - Open" to see more detail

If you are on the terminal, you can also use

wl -i eth6 assoclist

to see the associated client, in this case, my ET8 node is on eth6, as a wireless backhaul.

And then use the below see the client info:

wl -i eth6 sta_info client_MAC_address