alt Hacker News> Set transmit power to High
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.
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> 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.
The people reading this are techies. Nobody else will do this. Either it should be built into the protocol, or the advice should be abandoned.
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.
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.
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.
I'm the only person with a router that's broadcasting 6GHz in my apartment complex, so until that changes I'm gonna keep using High transmit power :)
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.