Today, I installed my first WiFi 7 access point, a Ubiquiti U7 Pro. Though WiFi7 is mostly going to waste here, with the internet only being 200 Mbps symmetric, and not a lot of LAN transfers that require a ton of speed, in this house, I unfortunately can't run Ethernet to most things in the location I want them to be, without having the location of the SFP changed, which I am tempted to do. I was hoping to improve the situation a bit, but this seems to not be happening.
I've been using a U6 Mesh at the far end of the house from this access point to both act as a WiFi extender and Ethernet bridge, because I get better performance going WiFi to Ethernet than WiFi direct, especially in terms of jitter and latency, plus I am connecting a couple of devices that don't have their own WiFi to the network this way.
I have a small 1Gbps PoE switch powering the access point and providing Ethernet ports for those devices.
Previously, I had been meshing the U6 Mesh with a U6 Light, which is only 2x2 on 5 gHz, and is limited to 80 mHz channel bandwidth. Ideally, I'd like to mesh over 6 gHz at 320 mHz, but without buying a second U7 Pro, I can't do that.
I was hoping to use 160 mHz for the link on 5 gHz, at the very least, which I have done successfully before on another Ubiquiti setup, but for whatever reason, the remote AP is stuck at 40 mHz, which is noticeably bottlenecking things, especially in the upstream direction. Channel bandwidth is controlled by the parent, which is set at 160 mHz, so why does it insist on hanging around at 40?
I HATE WIFI! I HATE IT SO MUCH!
I will probably upgrade the two U6 Pro's at home to U7 Pros when I get back, though, because they have 10g/2.5g/1g Ethernet, and I want to get stuff past the 1Gbps cap for local transfers at least. It's far too easy to saturate a 1Gbps connection these days, even over WiFi. WiFi7 can provide significantly more throughput than 1Gbps allows, even to a single client, so time to upgrade the infrastructure to support it.
Using iperf3 on my phone, I get 940 Mb/sec in both directions on either 5 or 6 gHz over the U7 Pro talking to an Ethernet-connected machine. The bottleneck, in this case, is actually the 1Gbps Ethernet on that machine, and the switch it's connected to.
The actual wireless link rate of my phone is currently 2.4 Gbps in both directions, as I am only about 8 feet from the access point, so I should see significantly more throughput than that if not for the 1Gbps Ethernet bottleneck.
And, as I understand it, the WiFi chip on iPhones is not actually capable of 320 mHz channel bandwidth, so I could be linking at 4.8 Gbps, in theory, using something else.
None of this matters given the current network infrastructure here, really.
I still hate WiFi, though.

Bri🥰
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