Do NOT do this if you live in a densely populated area (e.g. apartment complex). You'll create noise for yourself and everybody else. Classic prisoner's dilemma - a few people could be assholes and profit from it, but if everyone's an asshole everybody suffers.
General rule on TX power: start on low and increase only if you know (or can confirm) it helps. Go back down if it doesn't.
For the 6GHz frequencies used, this isn’t really as big of a deal as everyone has made it out to be. The advice was shared in the early days of 2.4GHz WiFi with into 3 non-overlapping channels, higher penetration of 2.4GHz signals, and competition with all of the other cheap devices in the 2.4GHz space.
The 6GHz space isn’t even competing with classic WiFi. It’s really fine. There’s no prisoner’s dilemma or some moral high ground from setting it to low. It will make virtually no difference for your neighbors.
The real world difference is actually pretty minimal between power settings.
The actual risk with modern hardware is that the high power setting starts running the power amplifier in a higher distortion area of the curve which degrades signal quality in exchange for incrementally longer range.
Also, the higher frequencies are much more affected by absorption from little things like "walls" and "trees" which are occasionally part of the RF environment, so you're far less likely to interfere with your neighbors doing this, than you were with 2.4GHz.
Also the reason it makes such an enormous difference to put your AP in the same room, if at all possible. Sneak a cable somewhere, park the AP in the far corner of the room, sure. But with zero walls in between, it's huge.
Or conduit so you can run something else too later if you want. There is a reason why commercial almost always does that. But also because they have money.
In my experience concrete walls and ceilings in apartment complexes completely block 5 GHz signals. Even through modern triple glass windows most of signal is lost. I can't receive any other 5 GHz networks inside my apartment, but around 50 on 2.4 GHz, which makes 2.4 nearly unusable anyway.
This is even more true for the WiFi 7 frequencies at 6GHz
The old tales about interfering with your neighbors, prisoners dilemmas, and claiming moral high ground from setting it to low is old school WiFi mythology that continues to be parroted around
In the US, I would venture at least half, if not more, apartment complexes have wood and drywall walls and ceilings. No concrete is used above the first floor.
>The style of buildings originated with the work of architect Tim Smith in Los Angeles, who took advantage of a change in construction code allowing the use of fire-retardant treated wood (FRTW) to construct buildings up to five stories.[5][7] From this he saw that what became the "Five-Over-One" model would bring the construction costs down substantially, making a 100-unit affordable housing project financially viable.
I have not seen any numbers showing that living in these types of buildings poses any additional risk, and it has been at least a decade since many of them have been built, so I presume it would be evident by now.
This may not help if you can’t control your environment. You will often benefit from nearby routers hearing you and each other if you are forced to share a channel with them, as that is what enables the carrier sensing to work correctly. Otherwise neighbouring APs that can’t hear your quieter use of the channel may shout over your devices rather than backing off, creating collisions and resulting in retransmits.
You can get this kind of interfere even if the signal from the router to your device is sitting just above the noise floor and the property next to you is doing the same thing. Both signals are so weak they get drowned out by an even weaker signal. The router on the other hand can’t tell the message is corrupted until your device responds.
You control your environment by not adding yourself to the dicks creating the bad environment. Everything else is just rationalizing for your own maximum convenience.
There is no such problem as "you have to shout enough so the others hear that you're there". There's no such thing, by at least 2 different vectors. 1, They hear everyone just fine, weak and strong, all at the same time. 2, It doesn't matter even if they didn't, because you obviously hear them if you're getting clobbered by them, and so your router can channel hop around them even if they don't channel hop around you.
While indeed you shouldn't fix noise by shouting louder, your justification isn't quite right.
1. It's the AP that has to decide to change channel, and if you live somewhere with channel contention, from its perspective all channels will be busy. At that point, if your channel appears the quietest (either by being the least noisy or by your clients not being active), then the AP will decide to clobber your channel. Their WiFi devices may also not hear you and won't back off to give your airtime, even though you hear theirs and give them airtime.
2. Having your AP change channel (note: channel hopping is something else entirely, which isn't used for WiFi) wouldn't help when all channels are busy. As long as your usage appears quiet, other APs will keep moving on top of you during their channel optimization.
For residential, the only solution is to use technology that cannot propagate to neighbors. 5/6GHz and many APs, and good thick walls (mmm, reinforced concrete). WiFi channels is a solution to make a few bits of equipment coexist in the same space, but is of limited use when it comes to segregating your space from that of your neighbors. Especially if you want good performance, as there's very few wide channels available.
Well, everything attenuates everything, and you want signals from your neighbors attenuated to the point of non-existence to avoid having your devices back off. That's quite a bit more than a few sheets of regular drywall.
If you’re using the same channel as a neighbouring router that’s close enough to overpower yours then you’ve already lost, pick a different channel. If you stick to 20 mhz there are plenty options, even more if you are able to use DFS channels.
How likely am I to even detect my neighbors 6GHz network?
I live in a very dense part of Chicago. 2.4 and 5 are a minefield, just a thick soup of interference on everything but the DFS channels (which I get kicked off of too often being close to two airports). While it could be that zero neighbors have 6E or 7 equipment, I find that hard to believe, but nothing comes up on the scan.
6 GHz capable access points / routers are in the Extremely Expensive realm, as a 6 GHz radio on its own is almost useless these days unless all your devices are high end and brand new. Got a security camera? No 6 GHz. Got an old laptop? Nope. What about that iPad from 2019 that still works great? Nope. Smart TV? Nope.
"Extremely Expensive"? I can get an Archer BE3600 from my local Microcenter for $90. Comcast is sending 6E/7 capable router/AP combos to customers with fast enough connection speeds.
The Archer BE3600 is uninteresting to me. It only does 2x2 MIMO which means that beamforming is not as effective as it is for 3x3 or 4x4 MIMO routers, and it therefore has worse coverage. The end result is that previous gen 3x3 or 4x4 routers are a better option for typical users. Going to 3x3 or 4x4 with 3 bands is where things become ridiculously expensive.
If all you care about is the peak speed at short range, sure, maybe it's the right choice. But for most people coverage is far more important.
The Archer C80 has 3x3 MIMO and costs under US$40. I get 400-500Mbps over wireless (which is firmly in the Good Enough territory for many uses) with it on most 2x2 devices, plus I can install twice as many for the cost of a single Wifi 7 router to get better coverage. That seems like a win to me.
The only person I've encountered recently that had a legitimate actual need for multi-gigabit wireless and internet access works on cleaning up LIDAR data from construction site scans. Maybe if you're editing a lot of video content, but people doing that tend to benefit more from fast local storage during the editing process.
End-user wise the only customer I've had that sustained a gigabit transfer rate for multiple days was doing something stupid: they uploaded their 20 TB NAS to a backup service, reformated the unit, then downloaded it. They could have done an in place filesystem conversion cheaper and way faster, but they chose an option in the idiot realm instead. I'm guessing they don't have backups of their data and will be very disappointed when one of the HDDs dies.
There might be more people than you, but 6GHz with wide channels doesn’t penetrate very far. You wouldn’t be able to see all of the networks, just maybe your adjacent neighbors.
Quite right. However, if your wifi bridge has an option for auto tuning the power then that might be a future proofing option, assuming that everyone uses it, which they probably won't sigh
If wifi becomes a pain within a shared building then seriously consider ethernet. Slimline stick on trunking will hide the wires at about £1-2/m. A box of CAT6, solid core is less than £1/m. You will also need some back boxes, modules and face plates (~£2.50 each) and a POST tool (fiver?) Or you can try and bodge RJ45 plugs onto the solid core CAT6 - please don't unless you really know what you are doing: it looks messy and is seriously prone to weird failures.
‘High power’ on a router is mostly useful to borderline clients. Without that, they likely won’t even be able to see it. It’s hard to auto detect that situation initially, since how can you tell someone you can’t hear to get louder?
You should use the lowest setting that works for you, because high power can mean worse performance - either due to high distortion, multipathing (reflections) or the AP heating up and throttling.
Agree you want TX power as low as you can, but in practice, I've always found there's at least once device in my house that'll benefit from an increased TX power. Also I generally just the FCC in setting reasonable power limits for what 'high' should be.
Do NOT do this if you live in a densely populated area (e.g. apartment complex). You'll create noise for yourself and everybody else. Classic prisoner's dilemma - a few people could be assholes and profit from it, but if everyone's an asshole everybody suffers.
General rule on TX power: start on low and increase only if you know (or can confirm) it helps. Go back down if it doesn't.