[SOLVED] A WiFi 6 related question

[yowani21]

Hello everyone!

Are there any downsides to enabling OFDMA and MU-MIMO for the 2.4 Ghz band in the (ASUS AX86U) router settings? My biggest concern is that this might impede performance of the OFDMA/MU-MIMO feature on the 5 Ghz band.

My current settings for the 2.4 Ghz are ➡️ Multi-User MIMO: Enable and OFDMA/802.11ax MU-MIMO: DL OFDMA only

 

[bill001g]

I can't see why it would make a difference. You should be able to run the radios at different settings. Most 2.4 devices do not support wifi6 anyway and if you have a wifi6 device you will never run on 2.4 because the 5g band is so much faster.

Which settings work best is a strange question. You have testing sites that make all kinds of claims but in real world test how people houses are build have so much impact on the results it is very inconclusive what the best options are. In theory OFDM without MU-MIMO has more than 2 times the bandwidth.

So it is very hard to say if you are running multiple device at the same time does mu-mimo actually give you more total throughput even though the maximum any single device can get is lower.

What I have found is even 802.11ac is more than fast enough. Really high speed network really only benefits large file downloads. Device that are wifi only like tables or cellphones don't have large storage so don't for example download 60GB games where high speed transfer would be noticeable. If you are using a desktop pc on wifi you should try to use a wired connection of some type to ensure high speed transfers.

 

[yowani21]

I can't see why it would make a difference. You should be able to run the radios at different settings. Most 2.4 devices do not support wifi6 anyway and if you have a wifi6 device you will never run on 2.4 because the 5g band is so much faster.

Which settings work best is a strange question. You have testing sites that make all kinds of claims but in real world test how people houses are build have so much impact on the results it is very inconclusive what the best options are. In theory OFDM without MU-MIMO has more than 2 times the bandwidth.

So it is very hard to say if you are running multiple device at the same time does mu-mimo actually give you more total throughput even though the maximum any single device can get is lower.

What I have found is even 802.11ac is more than fast enough. Really high speed network really only benefits large file downloads. Device that are wifi only like tables or cellphones don't have large storage so don't for example download 60GB games where high speed transfer would be noticeable. If you are using a desktop pc on wifi you should try to use a wired connection of some type to ensure high speed transfers.

First of all, thank you for the reply. I am not savvy enough when it comes to wifi 6 and its inner workings, so this is all a bit confusing to me. Are you saying that OFDMA and MU-MIMO work separately for 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz, or are they a shared features? The latter worries me, if it means that they have to compete for them, since I have quite a few "ax" devices connected to my (2.4 Ghz) guest network. Sorry if my questions sound like incoherent mumbling of an average user. 😅

 

[bill001g]

They are completely different radio chips. I have not read the detail of if ofdma/mu-mimo mode is actually supported on 2.4g.

There is almost no difference between 802.11n an wifi6 when you run on 2.4g. The key difference would be if it can get qam1024 to run. This only really works at short distances so if it would have to drop back it might be called wifi6 but it is really running the same protocol as wifi4 (802.11n).

This is a try it and see what works best for you. The largest issue with wifi6 is all the other people stomping on your signals. This makes it very hard for it to use the best encoding. Hopefully wifi6e fixes this with the new 6g radio band.

 

[yowani21]

They are completely different radio chips. I have not read the detail of if ofdma/mu-mimo mode is actually supported on 2.4g.

I believe it is supported when AX mode is enabled for the 2.4 Ghz band. The settings to enable the two then appear and you can modify them to your liking. That's what I did at least.

This is a try it and see what works best for you. The largest issue with wifi6 is all the other people stomping on your signals. This makes it very hard for it to use the best encoding. Hopefully wifi6e fixes this with the new 6g radio band.

Thankfully, I live in a country where WiFi 5 is still not that widespread. Plus, in order to get a router that works on the 5 Ghz band, you would need to opt out for a more expensive plan. Consequently, there are only like 3 networks in my building that operate on said frequency.