I have been testing the Alta Labs AP6 over an extended period, comparing it with Aruba, Meraki, and UniFi.
What I’m experiencing with the AP6 is unstable latency. For example, ping to a device on the local LAN or to 1.1.1.1 fluctuates from around 4–6 ms up to 50–60 ms, and it varies significantly. This does not appear to be caused by the RF environment, as the testing has been thoroughly validated using tools like Ekahau and others.
When I replace the AP6 with a UniFi U6 Pro or a Meraki MR36, using the same transmit power and channel settings, the latency becomes stable.
This is also noticeable during normal web browsing, where pages can sometimes feel slightly unresponsive. It’s especially apparent in gaming scenarios where latency is critical.
Is anyone else experiencing this? I see the same behavior across three AP6 units. Unfortunately, I don’t currently have access to an AP6 Pro for comparison testing.
Are you sure you are using the same channels on all APs for your testing? Also, how long have the APs been powered up when you are seeing the latency, and do you see increased latency more than once per hour? Your wireless environment, and interference with other neighboring APs, will greatly impact the latency you see when you are connected to an AP.
Yes, all the same settings across two sites. Tested with PC, Mac (M2 and M4), iPhones, Pi 4, etc. The latency fluctuates many times within an hour. It’s not a huge problem, but other APs feel more responsive, and even ICMP ping is much more stable on other APs compared to the AP6.
We have the exact opposite experience in our testing with other APs, so if you can provide more raw data, that would be very helpful to understand if there is an actual problem.
What channels are you configuring your APs on? Are you seeing these latency issues more than once per hour after the first hour? Most likely, you are seeing latency introduced by the AP or your device scanning. You can tell if the AP is scanning by looking at the system log, and you can disable scanning until the next configuration change to at least rule out scanning with ‘killall qcawifi-scanner’ on the AP.
Since you asked if anyone else was seeing issues like yours @eba , I figured I could at least toss some data in. I’m not seeing an frequent latency spikes as far as I can tell, just to cut to the chase on that, but hopefully this can help in some way
I have a couple of AP6’ running in my environment along with Orb running on an M1 MacBook, so here’s a quick snapshot of some statistics Orb recorded over an hour:
Did you try to ssh to the debug (or shift click on it) and run killall qcawifi-scanner ? Most likely you are just seeing the AP scanning, and you can disable that for testing purposes, to rule anything else out.
