Since the last major overhaul (https://vyos.dev/T452), newer WiFi standards have been established and hardware is becoming available to the open market.
This feature request shall concentrate on implementing WiFi Access Points on the 6GHz band. To ease development, the focus should be on implementing WiFi-6e (IEEE 802.11ax for 6GHz).
Reasoning:
* Implementing WiFi-6e (IEEE 802.11ax for 6GHz only) would be less complicated than adding yet another set of flags (HE) to the current set of WiFi configurations covering HT and VHT. In hostapd, WiFi-6e is done differently and requires a different set of settings.
* The 6GHz band offers a vast improvement on bandwidth in many countries where the 5GHz bands are severely regulated (such as in Europe). While on 6GHz one may easily achieve throughput of more than 1GBit/sec, this is almost not possible on 5GHz, making development effort for 5GHz questionable.
* Later implementations for WiFi-7 (IEEE 802.11be) would be similar to WiFi-6e. WiFi-7 would also use 6GHz, but is not limited to that band by standard IEEE 802.11be.
Suggested testbeds:
I have done some prior research on what hardware might be available to implement this. These were my results so far:
* Atheros ath11k devices might be available on some places - however, I could not find a source in Europe for a decent device.
* MEDIATEK Filogic 330 (mt7922e) and Filogic 630 (mt7916e) are available and support WiFi-6e AP mode on 6GHz. Sources below. I was able to set up a 6GHz AP based on Debian Trixie (Kernel 6.7) and connect to that AP, however, the connection was instable and only held for a minute or so. This time was enough to run iperf3 which yielded throughput of more than 100 MBytes/sec on that prototype. I used both, a mt7916e and mt7922e module as AP on a PC-Engines APU3.
Sources:
* MEDIATEK Filogoc 630:
* NGFF M.2 3052 module: https://asiarf.com/product/wi-fi-6e-m-2-ae-key-module-mt7916-aw7916-aed/
* mPCIe 3052 module: https://asiarf.com/product/wi-fi-6e-mini-pcie-module-mt7916-aw7916-npd/
* MEDIATEK Filogic 330:
* NGFF M.2 2230 MEDIATEK MT7922 aka. AMD RZ616 devices are available as builtin OEM modules or from Ebay and Amazon marketplaces.
While I'll be working on this topic and subsequently adding results to this post, I'd be glad for any help on stabilizing the 6GHz AP configuration. Here are my //minimal// config snipplets:
My /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf. Start AP using `hostapd -t -d -P /var/run/wlan0.pid /etc/hostapd/hostapd-minimal.conf`
```
interface=<WIFI-NIC>
country_code=<COUNTRY-CODE>
hw_mode=a
ssid=<SSID-IDENTIFIER>
sae_password=<PASSPHRASE>
wpa_key_mgmt=SAE
wpa=2
auth_algs=1
wpa_pairwise=CCMP CCMP-256 GCMP GCMP-256
rsn_pairwise=CCMP CCMP-256 GCMP GCMP-256
channel=1
chanlist=1 33 65
op_class=134
ieee80211ax=1
ieee80211w=2
wmm_enabled=1
wme_enabled=1
he_bss_color=23
he_oper_centr_freq_seg0_idx=15
```
I directly used wpa_supplicant to connect as NetworkManager mostly failed to detect and connect to the AP. Here is my wpa_supplicant.conf. Connect using `sudo wpa_supplicant -d -i wlp1s0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf`.
```
ctrl_interface=/run/wpa_supplicant
update_config=1
#ap_scan=0
country=<COUNTRY-CODE>
network={
scan_freq=5955 5975 5995 6015 6035 6055 6075 6095 6115 6135 6155 6175 6195 6215 6235 6255 6275 6295 6315 6335 6355 6375 6395 6415
ssid="<SSID-IDENTIFIER>"
key_mgmt=SAE
auth_alg=OPEN
ieee80211w=2
sae_password="<PASSPHRASE>"
}
```