6ghz communication issues on WAX630e

Hi,

We recently did an installation with the WAX630e APs and encountered issues with the 6ghz wifi; a working configuration has been found with the APs, but I wanted to report what we found during the setup.

The installation is meant to handle streaming VR games in a VR arcade facility; we use the focus 3 headsets to provide a VR experience through wifi, more info on the headset here :

https://www.vive.com/fr/product/vive-focus3/overview/

Running this kind of experience requires good network quality ; the headsets can connect to 6ghz networks, so we decided to go that route to minimize collisions with other 5ghz devices. We also needed an access point with POE support, hence the choice of the WAX630e model.

Configuration is as follows : we have 6 computers connected to a single ethernet usb switch, the switch is connected through one wire to another ethernet switch, and 2 APs of the same model are connected through their own POE wire on the same switch. All the wires and switches support gigabit LAN.

Then, we have 6 headsets connecting through wifi to the 2 APs, 3 headsets per AP; we make sure each headset connect to its corresponding AP by broadcasting a unique SSID per AP, each being a 80mhz dedicated 6ghz channel.

Each headset is meant to connect to its corresponding computer in the installation, and the expected stream between the two is ~40mbps, that means that we need to have ~120mbps going through each AP.

To validate our wifi configuration, we use the netspot application on a 6ghz compatible machine, as netspot now displays 6ghz wifi networks.

The APs are installed both the same way, the steps being :

- Make sure AP is using latest firmware, being at time of writing V10.6.0.7
- Start from a device that has been reset
- Do the first installation through local network configuration wizard, not Insight
- When AP has rebooted, disable 2.4ghz and 5ghz wifi, and enable the wifi SSID on 6ghz
- Select a dedicated channel for the 6ghz band

Now, the working configuration we found is to have one AP on 6ghz channel 5, and the other on 6ghz channel 37; with that setup the streaming works fine on all the headsets.
But the previous configuration we had was one on the channel 5, one on the channel 85, the other extremity available in the 6ghz band in our country ; this behaved like if communication on one AP would interfere with communication happening on the other AP.

We tested this overlapping issue by connecting our 6ghz compatible computer to the APs, generate traffic, and observe in a test headset if the stream gets interrupted.
If the computer is attached to the same AP as the headset, the stream works correctly; if it is connected to the other AP, the stream gets choppy as soon as we generate traffic.
The same repro steps do not show any issue when the AP is switched from channel 85 to channel 37.

This behaviour does not make much sense to us, as in both configurations, the networks have their own dedicated channels and do not overlap. Since we found a working configuration, we did not investigate other channel combinations, but did we encounter an interference issue with our bad configuration ?

Thanks,