Wi-Fi6/802.11ax is a newer standard in Wi-Fi, providing higher data rates, increase capacity, power efficiency. However, in a typical environment, there are not many Wi-Fi6/802.11ax clients just yet. With that being said, there may be times when we need to disable Wi-Fi6/802.11ax.
I have two Wi-Fi6 access points in my home lab Ruckus R730 and R750 and using Ruckus vSZ-H for the management of these access points. I wanted to see if I can simply turn off Wi-Fi6/802.11ax on an SSID. Going through the SSID options in the vSZ-H I did not see any option/ability to turn off Wi-Fi6/802.11ax. Similarly, under the access point settings, I did not see any option/ability to turn off Wi-Fi6/802.11ax.
Then I started to look at the command line of the access point and found the following commands:
get wlanlist [Let's you find out the list of WLANs]
get mode WIFI-Name [Tells the the mode WLAN is using]
set mode WIFI-Name "desired-mode" [Let's you configure desired mode]Before you can find the mode of a specific SSID and/or set it, you have to find out the associated “wlan##”. This can be achieved by using the command “get wlanlist” command. It will give you the following output:
Looking at the list above I can find out that my SSID (ruckus-dual) maps to wlan33 in the access point. Now using the command shown below I can find out the mode that SSID is using. Wi-Fi Explorer Pro shows HE IE’s in the frames.
“get mode wlan33”
Next, I needed to set that radio to Wi-Fi5/802.11ac mode. This can be accomplished directly from the access point or the vSZ-H CLI. The screen shot below shows different modes that are supported and can be set. After setting the mode to Wi-Fi5/802.11ac “get” command confirms that the new mode is “11ac”.
“set mode wlan33 11ac”
Next I fired up Wi-Fi Explorer Pro to confirm if the HE IE’s were still present or not. Capture below shows only HT (802.11n/Wi-Fi4) and VHT (802.11ac/Wi-Fi5) IE’s were present.
NOTE: As of this writing and vSZ-H version 5.2.0.0.699. I have not been able to find out a way to disable Wi-Fi6 from the UI. If there is something I may have missed please feel free to contact me via the comment section and/or twitter @malief46. Thank you.