WiFi6E stability and roaming aggressiveness issues

[CREWvzw]

Hi, I've been testing the Vive Focus 3, its wifi capabilities and VBS performance the past week and I've noticed several issues. I've been testing with 4 Vive Focus 3 headsets and a pair of Ubiquiti U6E Access Points.

WiFi 6E connection stability

I've had considerable connection stability issue while connected via 6GHz, even when in the direct vicinity of the access point. I get frame stuttering, corrupted frames and higher latency. This while when I was testing the headsets with 5GHz, I had very good performance. I even had four headsets connected to a client at 100mbps static bitrate. However once I switched to 6GHz, I had trouble maintaining a connection to the access point, let alone establish a VBS connection. Even once I managed to establish a relatively stable connection, the performance of 6E was not good at all, especially compared to 5GHz.

Roaming Aggressiveness

I was testing how the Vive Focus 3 handles the handoff between two access points. I did not get it to work properly at all. The Vive Focus 3 stubbornly maintains connection to the first access point even when the headset is much closer to the second access point and the connection quality and performance was horrible. Is there any way to tweak this?

[Heretiiik]

Hi,
without going into too much of a detail of the poor 6E performance, there is a bug in headset's Qualcomm wifi chipset when paired with Qualcomm powered access point (which Ubiquity and for exmaple Ruckus uses) that causes this behaviour. There is currently no viable workaround but qualcomm is working on a fix which should be released in following months. In the meantime using 5GHz band or non Qualcomm based AP ( we tested Cambium XE3-4 and NETGEAR RAXE500 and both work completely fine ) is the only solution.

As for the issues with roaming, the headsets should support 802.11r. We are currently using roaming on one of our sites and works fine. However it required a lot of tweaking on the AP side to make it work and we are using for load balancing rather than extending coverage.

Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Heretiiik

[CREWvzw]

On 6/15/2023 at 5:21 PM, Heretiiik said:

Hi,
without going into too much of a detail of the poor 6E performance, there is a bug in headset's Qualcomm wifi chipset when paired with Qualcomm powered access point (which Ubiquity and for exmaple Ruckus uses) that causes this behaviour. There is currently no viable workaround but qualcomm is working on a fix which should be released in following months. In the meantime using 5GHz band or non Qualcomm based AP ( we tested Cambium XE3-4 and NETGEAR RAXE500 and both work completely fine ) is the only solution.

As for the issues with roaming, the headsets should support 802.11r. We are currently using roaming on one of our sites and works fine. However it required a lot of tweaking on the AP side to make it work and we are using for load balancing rather than extending coverage.

Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Heretiiik

Thanks for the detailed answer on a very specific issue on a very niche application! Much appreciated! It's good to know that the issue is not (immediately) my ignorance in networking and wifi

[GhostPsi]

On 6/15/2023 at 5:21 PM, Heretiiik said:

Hi,
without going into too much of a detail of the poor 6E performance, there is a bug in headset's Qualcomm wifi chipset when paired with Qualcomm powered access point (which Ubiquity and for exmaple Ruckus uses) that causes this behaviour. There is currently no viable workaround but qualcomm is working on a fix which should be released in following months. In the meantime using 5GHz band or non Qualcomm based AP ( we tested Cambium XE3-4 and NETGEAR RAXE500 and both work completely fine ) is the only solution.

As for the issues with roaming, the headsets should support 802.11r. We are currently using roaming on one of our sites and works fine. However it required a lot of tweaking on the AP side to make it work and we are using for load balancing rather than extending coverage.

Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Heretiiik

Is there a issue thread raised at qualcomm kinda like the microsoft bugs you can follow updates on? 

[bjth]

Posting this here for archival purposes.

We are experiencing the same problems with the VIVE Focus 3 and a tp-link EAP690E HD.
Switching to 5GHz seems to have solved the problem, so I'm assuming the AP is using a Qualcomm-based chip.
@Heretiiik do you happen to have an upstream issue that's being tracked? Like @GhostPsi mentioned.

[darrint]

Any update on this?