@mdk wrote:
> More power = more interference
Not necessarily. Your other devices should automatically use a different WiFi channel, to minimize the interference from the one channel that the cable-modem is using.
No, this is not the case for everybody. I am an WISP network engineer by trade with a bunch of routers and APs and other devices at home. I very carefully manage the frequencies used by each device in my home, set statically so they won't interfere, but the XB6 is a wildcard. It seems to avoid DFS channels so it will only be in either the low or high 5GHz range. Not only that, but it transmits 13dB hotter than any other wireless AP at the same distance away in the low or high 5GHz bands. I suspect one of the earlier posts was correct, that this is transmitting much hotter than should be allowed by Industry Canada regulations, suggesting that there is a misconfiguration of either the country setting or the antenna gain for the built in antennas.
Although there is certainly much less interference when wireless radios are not being used for any active traffic, you still have beacons happening at an interval of around 100ms by default, and those beacons from the XB6 will cause interference for any other APs that are on the same frequency band. There is no magical "multiplexing" that will help with this. The OFDMA in wifi6 is really geared towards helping situations where you have multiple clients using the same AP, not multiple APs on the same channel.
Making the situation even worse is that every time the XB6 is rebooted it will reselect the frequencies and interfere with a different device I have at home, requiring that I move everything around again to avoid it. This is really not acceptable.
Disconnecting the antenna leads is not a good solution as that could blow the wireless radio theoretically if something did try to connect to it. Putting the device into a Faraday cage or wrapping it in tinfoil as a sort of poor man's Faraday cage could risk overheating the device due to the reflected microwaves, and would look incredibly stupid to boot.
Unlike other posters in the thread I'm not afraid of the "radiation" this is putting out, even though it seems to be well above the Tx power allowed by IC regulations. I just don't want this causing interference issues with my other devices as I am never going to buy a Blue Sky TV cable box.
