Hi everyone,
Recent investigation by RTings revealed that none of customer routers tested supports simultaneous MLO WiFi which was one of key promises of WiFi 7, including Flint 3 and Slate 7:
Does GL.iNET plan to bring it in the future via a firmware update? And if not, please really consider it for Flint 4 and other future products.
Honestly I think we need to wait for MLO to mature, it's also not only on the GL firmware side but both.
There are clients which do bad roaming decisions on MLO, but there also very early implementations in the Qualcomm firmwares before the wifi alliance added it officially as a standard in wifi7.
I think for now the best combination you can have for MLO is a client which does it fine, and a router which don't support 6ghz but MLO.
I learned that some MLO router implementations sometimes forces an old iot device which doesn't support MLO to use 6ghz which isn't possible, and causes failure.
There are also some corner cases I found with the Beryl 7, if set in repeater mode, my phone tries to use 2.4ghz MLO band for some reason, when basically I'm near it.
Ps: I know Beryl is Mediatek, but I'm also aware the last wifi 7 routers before the Beryl all are Qualcomm.
Well, the maturing has to start somewhere, and since standard has been fully ratified in mid 2025, there’s no excuse not to fully support it, especially for a innovative and prosumer-oriented company like GL.iNet.
To be honest I have little hope for implementation with current devices (although it might be easier with something like Flint 3 since it’s based on Qualcomm), but I would really like to see it in Flint 4. Since it’s currently in development time-wise it should workout great. Additionally as it’s apparently going to be Mediatek-based, it might be also right time to start working with them on this.
Hi,
We’re not entirely sure how their testing was conducted.
After an initial discussion with our R&D team, we can confirm that the BE9300 and BE3600 (as well as other upcoming Wi-Fi 7 products) support STR-MLMR, meaning they can transmit data simultaneously across multiple bands.
When connecting a supported device to the router, the driver information indicates this:
(My phone only supports Wi-Fi 7 on 2.4GHz and 5GHz, so it only shows two bands.)
You can also perform a simple speed test using a device that supports MLO + STR-MLMR. You should see that the wlan02 (2.4GHz), wlan12 (5GHz), and wlan22 (6GHz) interfaces are transmitting data simultaneously.
Please make sure the phone has successfully negotiated and decided to transmit data across all bands; otherwise, you will only see traffic increasing on some of the interfaces.
(The number of RX/Tx packets and bytes will increase.)
ifconfig wlan02 && ifconfig wlan12 && ifconfig wlan22
So rtings author was looking at the wifi limitation of their MacBook, which only supports wifi6e not wifi7, instead of router limitations?
Unfortunately for the author they can't even turned to a USB wifi7 adaptor for testing on their MacBook due to more limitations of the device.
Very odd that they had a Linux machine for a portion of the testing but didn't use that for the packet capture portion. It is easy to get wifi7 working on Linux or Windows. The last 5 years of MacOS devices are the only devices that can't support wifi7 and that is where they decided to do the testing from.
Interesting, according to the article they didn’t try to actually use MLMR transmission, they’ve just checked what capabilities router advertised - to my understanding it seems like a valid methodology, even if their client didn’t support simultaneous MLO. Perhaps it would be worth for GL.iNet connect one of engineers with author of the article RTings to hellp clarify this matter?
Unfortunately I’m still on WiFi 6 (looking for upgrade at the moment), so can’t test it myself.