GWTechTalk
Occasional Visitor
I believe there’s currently nothing that can be done to address Broadcom-related errors or issues with Multi-Link Operation (MLO), as these are proprietary to Broadcom. That said, I own the same router and, in my experience, there is no tangible advantage to using MLO over simply enabling a 320 MHz channel width on the 6 GHz band.I'm running beta2 on my BE96U as the main with one AiMesh node (BE92U) running stock fw.
I've been having issues where the wifi networks all drop ever 12-24hrs. In the AiMesh settings, I'm running Wifi7 with MLO. The most instability seems to happen when I enable 'MLO Fronthaul for Clients' which I'd like to use if it were more stable.
I've also upload the syslog file (BE96U) for when the wifi network all drops off, the timestamp to start looking at the wifi dropping event is "Apr 22 19:10:14".
When I've run this syslog through some LLMs, it seems to point to the Broadcom driver due to error messages such as "WLC_SCB_DEAUTHORIZE error (-30)" and "Previous authentication no longer valid (2)".
Maybe this will be helpful in tracking something down. Thanks Merlin.
MLO operates by splitting traffic—one connection for upload and another for download. However, there are no consumer-grade adapters on the market today that can handle more than two simultaneous connections, not unless you wish to spend $300-$600 only on a Wi-Fi adapter. I recommend disabling 2.4 GHz as an available MLO band. The biggest issue I’ve noticed is that MLO can actually reduce performance. One direction (either upload or download) often underperforms, creating an imbalance. For example, your device might be downloading over 6 GHz at 320 MHz and achieving speeds around 1.8 Gbps at 25 feet. But if upload is routed through the 5 GHz band at 160 MHz, your connection might show an estimated 2 Gbps link speed—yet, real-world throughput drops to around 1 Gbps or less due to overhead.
In my opinion, MLO is not ready for widespread use. I suspect that each MLO link is not operating in half-duplex mode, effectively cutting the available bandwidth in half still. I also believe the advertised performance claims are misleading, especially when encryption overhead is factored in—though I haven’t yet tested this specifically.
There has been some discussion about eventually allowing any band and any channel width to participate in MLO. If that becomes possible, we could potentially see two separate 6 GHz connections each using 320 MHz, which might allow a 2x2 client to achieve a full 5 Gbps in both directions. That would be a game-changer.
Lastly, don’t rely too heavily on your device’s reported link speeds. In practice, you’ll typically get about half of the estimated throughput. If you want a more accurate measure, check your router’s wireless logging page. It displays real-time bandwidth allocation per client—but again, expect to see only about half of those numbers in real-world use.
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