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Mac Mini M2 / MBP Can't Find 6Ghz

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I am running 3 AXE-16000's with a wired backhaul on the latest Merlin 388.1. I am having an issue with Apple's latest Mac Mini M2 and MBP seeing the 6Ghz network. From what I've been able to understand (with the help from Adrian at Intuitibits) is that these products rely on "reduced neighbor reports" to discover the 6Ghz network when running 2.4 or 5Ghz (smart connect not enabled) but I have not had any success. I've seen other users complain of the same issue with Asus routers on stock firmware as well, and Asus claims they do not have a feature to enable RNR. Anyone find a fix?
 
Apple has a fairly interesting support document about using 6E. The most relevant suggestion seems to be that you must use the same SSID across all three bands. I had not understood what the technical reason was for that, but if they're trying to cut down on neighbor detection, maybe that's the connection?
 
Thanks tgl for the reply. I did read that as well as they just released that support doc but still had an issue using a single SSID - I do prefer to keep multiple SSID's so I am hoping there is alternative solution.
 
Did you also read their linked document about recommended router settings? Scanning that quickly, there's nothing terribly exciting about the router side, but I did notice them saying that you'd better enable "Networking and wireless" under Location Services on your Mac. While this seems surprising at first glance, I'd bet it means that they won't turn on the 6GHz radio without evidence that the machine is in a country that allows it.
 
I'm about out of ideas then ... anyone else?

(I do have one of these minis on order, so I might have a better-informed opinion in a week or so.)
 
Actually ... after a bit of googling for "reduced neighbor report" I have a better idea of what might be going on. Apparently, there's so darn much 6GHz spectrum that people don't want to make devices scan that whole spectrum for WiFi beacons. So the plan is that 6GHz access points will also broadcast beacons in 2.4 and/or 5GHz bands, and those beacons will carry "neighbor reports" mentioning that they are also serving such-and-such a 6GHz channel, and 6GHz clients will look for those beacons rather than trying to scan the 6GHz channels directly. (This feels a bit baroque, but then again there is little about modern WiFi practice that doesn't.)

It's not clear from what I read whether this mechanism constrains the SSID names to be the same on the different bands; the neighbor reports could carry the SSID name as well as the channel number for the alternate BSSIDs. But it definitely requires that the access point be sending this information. AFAICT these neighbor reports are required by the 802.11k spec, which has been out for awhile, so it's hard to believe that ASUS doesn't support it at all. But maybe you have it turned off --- in particular, I wonder if turning off "Smart Connect" and/or "Roaming assistant" would break it?
 
Actually ... after a bit of googling for "reduced neighbor report" I have a better idea of what might be going on. Apparently, there's so darn much 6GHz spectrum that people don't want to make devices scan that whole spectrum for WiFi beacons. So the plan is that 6GHz access points will also broadcast beacons in 2.4 and/or 5GHz bands, and those beacons will carry "neighbor reports" mentioning that they are also serving such-and-such a 6GHz channel, and 6GHz clients will look for those beacons rather than trying to scan the 6GHz channels directly. (This feels a bit baroque, but then again there is little about modern WiFi practice that doesn't.)

It's not clear from what I read whether this mechanism constrains the SSID names to be the same on the different bands; the neighbor reports could carry the SSID name as well as the channel number for the alternate BSSIDs. But it definitely requires that the access point be sending this information. AFAICT these neighbor reports are required by the 802.11k spec, which has been out for awhile, so it's hard to believe that ASUS doesn't support it at all. But maybe you have it turned off --- in particular, I wonder if turning off "Smart Connect" and/or "Roaming assistant" would break it?
 
Trophy for how results-driven you are! Hard to believe is the tagline here, as ASUS should in fact support RNR. I did press ASUS support team pretty hard when trying to figure it out, and there solution was to turn up bandwidth to 160 and control channel to the highest channel. This along with toggling smart connect and roaming assistant with no results. The 6Ghz is there in scans, Apple just can't / doesn't want to connect to it, or Asus missed RNR in their R&D
 
Hmm ... Apple flat-out doesn't do 160MHz in the 5GHz band, so that part of ASUS' reply was certainly snake oil. And if it's about what the beacons are carrying, I doubt channel width setting matters at all.

Anyway, I'm only just learning about this, so don't take anything I said as gospel.

What are you using to scan the 6GHz band, may I ask?
 
https://www.intuitibits.com/products/wifiexplorerpro3/ And I can confirm I see the 6 Ghz network on the pro version, I just don't have anything other than Apple products to test. Their explanation on 6Ghz discovery:
Hi Joe,

WiFi Explorer uses the underlying macOS library for Wi-Fi scanning, so if Mac can’t see the network, WiFi Explorer won’t see it either.

WiFi Explorer Pro 3 comes with a 7-day free trial when you download it from our website (https://www.intuitibits.com/download/wifiexplorerpro3). Please feel free to try it and see if you can get it to see your 6E network. Make sure to choose passive scan (All Channels) in the toolbar. For more information on passive scan mode, see: https://intuitibits.com/help/wifiexplorerpro3/#/topic-get_started-find_networks_adapter

Also, if you can send us the scan results (File > Save As), we could tell if the 2.4 or 5 GHz networks are correctly using out-of-band discovery, which is needed for Macs to find 6 GHz networks. Please indicate the BSSID or SSID of your networks.

Best Regards,

Intuitibits Support Team
support@intuitibits.com
Intuitibits LLC

Twitter: https://twitter.com/intuitibits
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/intuitibits
Slack: https://slack.intuitibits.com
 
I have a 2023 mac mini (M2 Pro) in hand now, so I started experimenting, using an ASUS ET8 as access point. The short answer is that it does work, but getting the AP configured properly is really frustrating. At least with the 386.49873 firmware (which is still the latest for this model, anyway). I think the ET8's configuration GUI is actually buggy: doing and then undoing a simple configuration change got me from working, to not working, to not working, and after that nothing I did made it work again. I would probably have given up some time ago except that I did see it work for a little bit.

I ended up doing a hard reset and reconfigure from scratch, and that got me to a working configuration that I'm now quite hesitant to mess with. For the archives' sake, here's a recipe that seems to work:

* Hard reset the router (I always use the WPS-button method).

* Connect to it, choose the "advanced setup" option, run through the configuration options it gives you. I selected access point mode because that's what I need; probably router mode would work as well. When you get to the screen where you configure the SSID names and passwords, do not enable the "separate bands" option, even though it tells you you ought to. It will not at this point let you set the 6GHz band SSID name the same as the others; just ignore that for the moment, and make sure the lower bands have the name you want, and that the same password is used for all.

* After it reboots, reconnect to it and finish up any other admin settings you want, not touching any wireless settings yet. Then turn on "ethernet backhaul" mode in AIMesh -> System settings.

* At this point it should be in "tri band smart connect" mode and advertising only one SSID for all bands. This is what you need to get it to talk to Apple gear. AFAICT it will not work without smart connect ON and wireless backhaul OFF; otherwise it seems not to broadcast the RNR packets that Apple needs to see, and/or not use the same SSID name across all bands.

The only additional wireless configuration I've risked changing is to cut the 2.4GHz bandwidth setting from 20/40 to 20MHz only, and force a particular 2.4GHz channel setting, because its default behavior tends to want to straddle multiple standard channels, which is not a great idea where I live.

Also, if you had any previous failed attempts to connect a given piece of Apple gear, telling it to "forget this network" and then re-join and re-enter the password seems to be helpful. For me it initially sort of worked without that, but then I noticed that System Settings -> WiFi was claiming that the AP was broadcasting a different SSID name for 6GHz. I wondered if I needed to do something weird in the AP's GUI, but turned out that "forget this network" cured that.

Anyway, the good news is it works. The bad news is that performance seems seriously erratic, at least as measured by iperf3. I'll just quote one iperf3 run to show you what I mean:
[ 5] 0.00-1.00 sec 182 MBytes 1.52 Gbits/sec [ 5] 1.00-2.00 sec 194 MBytes 1.63 Gbits/sec [ 5] 2.00-3.00 sec 195 MBytes 1.64 Gbits/sec [ 5] 3.00-4.00 sec 190 MBytes 1.59 Gbits/sec [ 5] 4.00-5.00 sec 189 MBytes 1.58 Gbits/sec [ 5] 5.00-6.00 sec 197 MBytes 1.65 Gbits/sec [ 5] 6.00-7.00 sec 74.6 MBytes 626 Mbits/sec [ 5] 7.00-8.00 sec 16.7 MBytes 140 Mbits/sec [ 5] 8.00-9.00 sec 11.7 MBytes 98.1 Mbits/sec [ 5] 9.00-10.00 sec 8.57 MBytes 71.9 Mbits/sec
I'm testing using a 2021 Macbook Pro -> Ugreen 2.5G USB/ethernet adapter -> ET8 WAN port -> wireless -> mini. I know from past testing that the MBP+Ugreen adapter can push close to 2.5Gbps, so that's not the bottleneck. With no other 6GHz gear at hand, I can't tell whether the ET8 or the mini is more at fault for the performance issue. It's not good though. This is under basically ideal conditions: AP and mini about 15 ft apart with clear line of sight, and I'm pretty sure none of my neighbors are using 6GHz yet. But either there's some bad interference somewhere, or Apple and/or ASUS have a lot of optimization work yet to do.

(Addendum: in the time it took to compose this post, the performance seems to have stabilized a bit, now averaging around 1.5Gbps to the mini and 1.15 from it. Maybe this hardware has some kind of learning/adaptation curve, or maybe the interference stopped for now? I'll keep an eye on it.)
 
Hah! I just realized one thing I'd not known before: if you option-click macOS' WiFi menu bar item so you can see the machine's current Tx rate etc, that in itself causes the machine's WiFi performance to go south for as long as you have that menu pulled down. This effect seems to explain much of the performance instability I was witnessing, because I'd been watching that number like a hawk while testing. A less-convenient-but-much-less-invasive way is to see what the router's Wireless Log says the client's Tx and Rx rates are.

(This is with current macOS Ventura 13.2.1; dunno if the problem exists in older releases, or with Intel hardware.)

Anyway, after removing that variable I'm seeing far-more-reproducible performance numbers. I still don't know what it's like with less-than-ideal WiFi conditions, but I plan to find out.
 
Getting 1.5Gbps is impressive! I had to SSH into the router and send a bunch of reports to Broadcom who were extremely helpful - Asus finally determined there was a bug in the latest build (3.0.0.4.388_22237-g9120e16), so they gave me another FW to test for the AXE 16000:


The new FW helped the M2 discover the 6Ghz SSID instantly, and I was able to connect the M2 without issue - I do get a “limited compatibility” warning in the M2 wireless settings which looks like the separation issue of the SSID’s and AirPlay.

For me, not a big deal at all.

For the WiFi stability (which seems to be an issue with this long running thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254587195?answerId=258671204022#258671204022), I have no issues there.

But, on a 1200 Mbps connection, I am only getting around 300 Mbps from the M2 in the same room as the main Node.

I am unsafely assuming this might be an “Apple” M2 optimization thing because even on an 2021 MBP I get around 700 Mbps on 5 Ghz.
 
The new FW helped the M2 discover the 6Ghz SSID instantly, and I was able to connect the M2 without issue - I do get a “limited compatibility” warning in the M2 wireless settings which looks like the separation issue of the SSID’s and AirPlay.

Cool, glad you got it working.

It's harder than it ought to be to find out exactly what the "limited compatibility" warning is moaning about, but you can get the details if you dig. It's not real clear to me exactly how bad a problem it is if you ignore it. Apple suggests that some Airplay functions might misbehave if the SSID names don't match, but that may not be a problem in your usage.

But, on a 1200 Mbps connection, I am only getting around 300 Mbps from the M2 in the same room as the main Node.

I am unsafely assuming this might be an “Apple” M2 optimization thing because even on an 2021 MBP I get around 700 Mbps on 5 Ghz.

I can now say fairly confidently that you should be able to do better than that, because I'm getting better results than that, once I stop doing things that interfere. One other thing I realized is that Screen Sharing eats a lot more bandwidth than you might guess. I had it set up to run that connection over the mini's ethernet port not WiFi, so I figured it was fine ... but then I messed up and had that connection going over the same ethernet cable as the iperf3 connection on my laptop, so that bollixed the performance numbers in some of my tests.
 
Hey - just received my MacMini 2023 and have exactly the same issue but what is the solution here? I am running Merlin so is the solution to install Asus FW? Please not.
 
Hi, yes the only way I got it to work is to use the ASUS beta software - Merlin 388.1 didn't work for me with the M2 and 6Ghz.
 
Yeah, getting 6GHz to work at all between ASUS and Apple hardware seems much harder than it ought to be. I gave a recipe that worked for me upthread, but I'm convinced there are bugs in ASUS' configuration code; sequences that ought to lead to the same state don't always.

As for performance, I found out the hard way that if you're controlling the mini via Screen Sharing, that in itself seems to cause wireless performance issues. If you reboot it and then ssh into it and run tests from that state, it's a lot better and more stable. This seems like pretty clearly an Apple software bug (which I've filed a bug report about, but the more people do likewise the more likely it is that Apple will fix it). For me it's not a huge problem because I'm running the mini mostly via ssh anyway, but if Screen Sharing is your main jam then it's gonna be an issue till they fix that.
 
Thanks everyone. For now is there anyway to get the bug deployed into the Merlin version ? I tried the alpha but no changes. I really don't want to go back to the stock version. Thanks a lot
 

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