160MHz not working on 802.11s mesh with Filogic/AX6000/AX4200

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hi, having had some good luck replacing my dad's old Belkin AC router with a TUF-AX4200 leading me to the revelation that OpenWRT supports AX devices these days, I set up an 802.11s mesh between a TUF-AX6000 (router) and 2x TUF-AX4200s (APs) which has been a big improvement in terms of throughput, range and latency (especially with SQM!) compared to the Huawei AX3s I was running but 160MHz doesn't appear to be working on the mesh network.

I'm unsure at this moment whether I've set something up wrong, although I can't imagine that would be the case since 160MHz to clients works fine on all three routers...

All three routers are running the latest snapshot (as the AX6000 is only supported in snapshot at the moment, anyway)

80mhzmesh
80mhzmesh1439×845 167 KB

2

Ah, looks like a known issue...

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3

As far as I can tell it is not just filogic. the issue is that the iw utility does not support wifi6 (AX) at all. In turn the OpenWrt mac80211.sh script uses iw to set up mesh interfaces.

Can you show the output of iwinfo please.

4

Sure:

m-11s-1   ESSID: "backhaul5"
          Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
          Mode: Mesh Point  Channel: 100 (5.500 GHz)  HT Mode: VHT80
          Center Channel 1: 106 2: unknown
          Tx-Power: 26 dBm  Link Quality: 45/70
          Signal: -65 dBm  Noise: -92 dBm
          Bit Rate: 803.4 MBit/s
          Encryption: WPA3 SAE (CCMP)
          Type: nl80211  HW Mode(s): 802.11ac/ax/n
          Hardware: embedded [MediaTek MT7986]
          TX power offset: none
          Frequency offset: none
          Supports VAPs: yes  PHY name: phy1

phy0-ap0  ESSID: "VM7161671"
          Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
          Mode: Master  Channel: 1 (2.412 GHz)  HT Mode: HE20
          Center Channel 1: 1 2: unknown
          Tx-Power: 20 dBm  Link Quality: 61/70
          Signal: -49 dBm  Noise: -92 dBm
          Bit Rate: 25.6 MBit/s
          Encryption: mixed WPA2/WPA3 PSK/SAE (CCMP)
          Type: nl80211  HW Mode(s): 802.11ax/b/g/n
          Hardware: embedded [MediaTek MT7986]
          TX power offset: none
          Frequency offset: none
          Supports VAPs: yes  PHY name: phy0

phy1-ap0  ESSID: "VM7161671"
          Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
          Mode: Master  Channel: 100 (5.500 GHz)  HT Mode: HE160
          Center Channel 1: 114 2: unknown
          Tx-Power: 26 dBm  Link Quality: 40/70
          Signal: -70 dBm  Noise: -92 dBm
          Bit Rate: 6.0 MBit/s
          Encryption: mixed WPA2/WPA3 PSK/SAE (CCMP)
          Type: nl80211  HW Mode(s): 802.11ac/ax/n
          Hardware: embedded [MediaTek MT7986]
          TX power offset: none
          Frequency offset: none
          Supports VAPs: yes  PHY name: phy1
5

So yes, that is what I am seeing:

  1. radio config set to HE160
  2. AP coming up as HE160
  3. Mesh coming up at VHT80

The config file is read by mac80211.sh and it uses the iw utility to set up the mesh interface.
However iw does not support the setting up of HE modes... so it falls back to VHT in this case or HT mode in the case of 2g band.

FYI - I am testing on a GL-MT3000

6

Ah, that's interesting: As you say, according to iwinfo, the mesh PHY is not only 80MHz but in VHT (ac) rather than HE (ax), so I wonder why UCI is reporting HE-MCS modes on the mesh.

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7

I assume you mean Luci.
I guess Luci starts with whatever is in the config file.
iw has no means of reading the current mode, and no means of setting HE modes.

The only options are (from running iw with no arguments):
iw dev <devname> set channel <channel> [NOHT|HT20|HT40+|HT40-|5MHz|10MHz|80MHz|160MHz]

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