I have been able to connect the GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 at WiFi 6 speeds using the 5.0 GHz band, however the GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 will not allow a WiFi 6 connection using the 2.4 GHz radio.
I’m not sure if this is a bug or not, could someone please clarify?
In addition, it is worth noting that default locale setting for the GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 is set to DE (Germany), which appears to limit the available channels that the GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 will scan and display via the LuCI interface and meant that I had trouble scanning for the 5.0 GHz Channel 141 U6-LR access point from the GL.iNet GL-AXT1800.
It took me a about an hour of changing settings when by accident I changed the U6-LR Access Point operating channel to 140 (on the 5.0 GHz spectrum, this is a centre frequency of 5700 MHz), at this point my Wi-Fi network became visible on the GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 scan page as an available 5.0 GHz network.
For those interested, here is the iperf3 performance when operating the U6-LR access point on the 5 GHz band only with a channel width of 20 MHz, 40 MHz, 80 MHz and 160 MHz using a Samsung Galaxy S21.
I have used a Samsung Galaxy S21 phone with a BCM4389 WiFi 6E chipset, which seems to be one of the best Wi-Fi transceivers on the market for mobile devices at the time of writing this, I’m quite satisfied with the U6-LR performance and here is some real world testing for those who think the wireless throughput on the U6-LR is poor:
5.0 GHz WiFi 6 @ 20 MHz width: ~ 200 Mbits/sec
5.0 GHz WiFi 6 @ 40 MHz width: ~ 400 Mbits/sec
5.0 GHz WiFi 6 @ 80 MHz width: ~ 500 Mbits/sec ( Screenshot attached)
5.0 GHz WiFi 6 @ 160 MHz width: ~ 10 Mbits/sec (Yes, 10 Megabits per second, performance was poor)
The poor performance at 160 MHz width on the 5 GHz band surprised me but maybe it was something to do with the operating frequencies being crowded, I’m unsure.
Just to clear matters up, it is not my intent to operate the GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 as a repeater, in repeater mode the GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 would also be broadcasting as an Access Point. It is my intent to have the GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 act solely as a wireless bridge, that is to say, it is a dumb client and all incoming packets are port forwarded to a single device connected to one of the GL.iNet GL-AXT1800’s LAN ports, as there is no routing it is as if the device connected to the GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 via ethernet was a client on the U6-LR subnet and behaved as any other device on the subnet.