WiFi 7 and MLO compatibility

Community Support
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1

Anyone else seen this?

FW13 bought about 6 months ago.

Ubuntu 26.04.1
Facotry installed WiFi card

I can connect to the wifi 7 router but nothing happens and no IP is given.
I have no issue when doing same on the 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz and 6Ghz

the SSID for wifi 7 is a MLO enabled SSID and im thinking this card doesn’t support it.

2

sorry, specs…

Fromework 13 AMD 300 series, Firmware 4.02
factory AMD RZ717 Wi-Fi 7 (MT7925)

Omada EAP773 WAP

3

Try running dmesg --follow and then attempt your WiFi 7 connection. You should get a bunch of logs. Hopefully some of them will be errors. Paste them here in a code block and someone will help you research the problem.

Both the card and the router should downgrade to an earlier protocol if they can’t establish WiFi 7. So I think something else is happening here. That said, you mention 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz and 6Ghz are working. Could you be more specific about what you are doing that does not work? I wonder if you are connecting on the console, and locking in some fashion to WiFi 7, so you are getting “WiFi 7 or nothing”.

4

Have you tried turning MLO off to see if it’ll work? I’d try the above steps first but then turn it off, considering there aren’t many devices out there that can take advantage of it in the first place. And those that can I find always have more connectivity issues than not.

5

It appears MLO with the MediaTek 7925 is only partially supported on Linux, lacking some proper driver/firmware.

Ubuntu 26.04 is an LTS version, with kernel 7.0 out of the box (AFAIK, I’m a Fedora user). This should support MLO if you have the correct drivers/firmware, or you may try to install kernel 7.2 from the backports, although this may introduce other side effects.

A cheap option would be to try with an Intel BE211NGW card, which seems to be shipped with FW13pro Intel-ultra-series-3 boards. According to forums this fully supports MLO under recent linux kernels.

If your cards technically supports it (I mean, with linux kernel/drivers/firmware) the steps below might help, this is how I got it working on my current setup (still waiting for FW13pro, batch 14), using an Intel BE200NGW:

  • create a dedicated SSID on you AP (in my case, Unifi with a mix of WiFi 7 capable and older HD WiFi 6 only APs)
    • Advertised only on my WiFi 7 capable APs
    • Enforcing WPA3 authentication (MLO depends on WPA3 SAE security options)
  • on client device
    • add the following to line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub cfg80211.ieee80211_regdom=XX (replace XX with your 2 letter ISO countrycode)
    • update grub
    • reboot
    • Add the new SSID from NetworkManager (there are guides to do the same with wpa_supplicant, adding options such as mlo=1 and/or key_mgmt=SAE / ieee80211ax=1 / ieee80211be=1)

If it is successfully enabling MLO, you should see things like this, if not check you dmesg or journalctl -u NetworkManager

$ sudo iw wlp130s0f0 info
Interface wlp130s0f0
ifindex 4
wdev 0x1
addr 52:58:63:xx:xx:xx
ssid XXXXX-MLO
type managed
wiphy 0
multicast TXQ:
qsz-byt qsz-pkt flows drops marks overlmt hashcol tx-bytes tx-packets
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
**MLD with links:

  • link ID 0 link addr ca:c1:e7:xx:xx:xx
  • link ID 1 link addr c2:c5:e4:xx:xx:xx
  • link ID 2 link addr e6:3b:76:xx:xx:xx**
    channel 85 (6375 MHz), width: 320 MHz, center1: 6265 MHz
    txpower 22.00 dBm

Note the Unifi disclaimer when enabling MLO, reason I created a dedicated SSID for confirmed capable devices:

Although MLO can boost performance by combining bands, most WiFi 7 devices still operate on a single band — so any benefits may be limited. To avoid potential interoperability issues, we recommend not enabling it at this time.

6

Do not get too excited about the MLO (multi-link) feature of WiFi7. Unless there have been some significant development in consumer access points what is out there currently is a half-attempt af MLO and is just marketing.

A significantly more powerful processor and faster electronics are needed to truly get the MLO as it has been envisioned by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Even among most routers that were on the market a few months ago it was working in theory but no significant gains were to be had except maybe frequency hopping. Even then some of the routers that were tested in the article I read only jumped between bands and some could only perform this to literally one or two links at a time. Hardly what MLO has been promoted as.

If faster throughout and latency is desired go wired.

Oh the Intel BE211 card is a CNVio card so it only works with Intel processor mainboards.

7

so MLO is not supported by this card i have. Tried the suggenstion on 7.2 kernel driver but although it would connect, it was intermittent and unstable.

Ultimately i disabled MLO and went wifi 6 as this was fastest stable connection on ubuntu 26.04.1 lts taht i could get.

8

Did you try disabling MLO for this SSID ? I’m not familiar with Omada APs, MLO is likely in some advanced settings of your SSID configuration, so you can continue benefiting from the advantages of WiFi 7, especially if you’re in a busy area where 6 Ghz band is less crowded.

9

Good to know about the CNVio mention, thank you. So in this case only a BE200 or BE210 would work with the full NVMe implementation.