I’ve been enjoying my AP6 Pro for a few months now. I just tried to play Valorant on a gaming laptop over WiFi, and it was impossible. My ping/lag spikes were every 15-30 seconds and the entire game would freeze for a while. I tested over Ethernet, and there were no such issues. So, I swapped out the AP with a TP-Link EAP670, and there were no such ping issues.
There aren’t many settings I can change with the AP6 Pro to test, but I would love suggestions.
I should also state that I have tried four different DNS servers including Comcast’s own. I tried static and DHCP.
Firmware: 2.0b
First picture should be AP6 Pro ping test, then Ethernet, then TP-Link EAP670.
Five minutes of pings from my iPhone on iOS 17.1.2. My bet is that your wireless device is a little overly aggressive in its power saving (which is highly dependent on what else is going on with the device), which could easily be confirmed with a monitor mode packet capture. I would make sure you are using the very latest wireless driver, too. You can improve your pings during gaming by running a 100 ms-interval ping in the background
I’m just more confused how the AP6 Pro has poor ping but another access point doesn’t, from the same device in the same location.
Edit:
I share my internet with my parents via a 60Ghz antenna. I just went over their house to test via WiFi (EAP620HD I believe), and their ping test is perfect just like mine was on a TP-Link AP. So, the only anomaly is the Alta AP, which results in poor ping performance across all devices I’ve tested (not just the gaming PC).
Are you using the same channel on both APs, with the same bandwidth? There are quite a few variables here that don’t appear to have been considered. I’m happy to dive in and help if you’ll invite me to your site to understand things further.
Also, I’m curious how many times you ran ping-test.net on each connection to get your graphs. Honestly, it took me quite a few times (5 to be exact) on my wired connections to get a graph as clean as your wired graph looks, and I have a very decent Internet connection. The results from ping-test.net don’t seem very consistent or reliable, from what I can tell.
I would make sure you are using the correct tool for the job; I would just do simple pings to a device on my LAN, and grab a monitor-mode packet capture to understand if there are any issues with the WiFi itself, not getting the Internet connection involved. ping-test.net seems like a tool that could be used to test worldwide connectivity, not necessarily from my laptop to my router.
Regardless of what test I am doing, Valorant is unplayable with the AP6 Pro via WiFi. I have mirrored the exact same channels and bandwidth as the AP6 Pro, and I have changed the channels and bandwidth of the AP6 Pro to the same result.
I’ve only played Valorant via Ethernet until I got a new gaming laptop. Since Valorant is unplayable via the AP6, I’ve dived further into testing my previous equipment and my parents equipment. It’s possible it’s up to my router (Pakedge RK1 [I am an AV dealer and test product all the time]), and it might think all of the pings from the AP6 Pro to Alta are bad or drop some here and there. No idea of the validity, but I plan to get a new router for testing soon.
AP6 Pro: Valorant is unplayable and extremely laggy
EAP670: Valorant is playable with the occasional stutters every 10-15 minutes or so
Ethernet: Zero issues with Valorant at all.
I’ll be sure to invite you as soon as I figure out how to.
If you’d like to invite me to help debug your issues there, just go to manage.alta.inc, then Settings->Users, and invite jeff@alta.inc, and I’ll take a look.
I was wondering if this was ever resolved? I’ve experienced a similar scenario in a home environment, when one of the AP6 Pro is under heavy load, other device have high ping time causing lag while gaming. I’m concerned that since there isn’t any fine tuning, this may be an issue.
And by heavy load, we were running speed tests that cause the lag spike in general. And no, the wan was not being saturated, this seemed more on the AP side. The wan has smart queue QOS to handle any high ping issue.
This was on the AP side, while pinging internally to a server, I saw as high as 800ms, averaging 300-400ms while doing speed test on the same AP.
I don’t have any way of seeing what settings the AP has enabled other than what’s on the GUI. Will there be more settings available in the future to tweak?
I had to switch back APs to Unifi U6 as they don’t have this issue at all. I will admit, I was impressed how well the Alta AP6 Pro provide better performance, aside the lag spikes.
We have two SSID, one main (5 & 2.4ghz) and one for 2.4 only. Only the main SSID has different VLANs, which I prefer not to combine into one network as I have static IPs which will be a pain to undo and redo.
@Slagish There are quite a few variables involved here, but we can’t reproduce anything like what you appear to be seeing, unless you are pretty far (i.e. too far) away from your AP… What channel(s) were the APs on, and are they the same/same bandwidth? What was the signal strength on each AP? As I’m typing I’m getting 500 Mbps to a local server with <40ms pings, on my AP6-Pro on a DFS channel. For optimal latency, you’ll definitely want to use DFS channels.
Games don’t typically max out the WiFi connection during play, anyway.
Sorry for the confusion. 3 different devices would get lag spikes while gaming if a 4th device ran speed test on the same AP. The WAN Bandwidth was not being saturated at that point.
There were a total of roughly 9 device connected to the same AP, but were not actively using bandwidth aside for 2 cameras that were uploading about 4mbps.
I’ll have to wait until Thursday to do another test as I had to put the Unifi APs back up for now. Thursday evening I’ll replace them and connect the devices back for testing.
It would be very helpful if you could at least tell me what channels and channel widths the APs are using. What throughput was your speed test computer achieving, and what was its signal strength? I’d love to help, but without being able to reproduce (believe me, we’re trying), I’ll need to get more information.
I haven’t tried gaming on the AP6 Pro since I reinstalled it, but I’m not sure it would magically be better. I have a friend who has an AP6 (works for me) that can reproduce the latency issues I’m having, but also does not have an issue with a Ruckus R510 connected to the same network.we can both isolate our ping issues to our AP6 APs.
The thing about bufferbloat on the router, especially for gaming, is that it’s very non-deterministic, and would randomly impact any AP. Do you have any form of traffic shaping enabled on your router, which should help you get an A score on your grade there?
I do not have traffic shaping, QoS, IPS/IDS, or anything else turned on that would alter the speeds/traffic. It’s as basic and flat as you can get.
I have not tried that website with the TP-Link AP yet, I don’t feel like constantly switching APs every day, and then I get yelled at by those in my house. If I have time, I will run the test with the AP6 Pro and then immediately with the TP-Link directly after making sure to mirror the channels and bandwidth.
