AWDL on Macs can interfere with your WiFi connections

This is a PSA for Mac users on wireless, as it surely quietly affects many others. Please don't upvote this but let it roll off new, hopefully having helped someone along the way.

For years I've endured the fact that my Macs see periodic latency spikes when connected to WiFi. My Windows box on the same band / router would see solid 1ms pings to the router all day long, but my Macs would jump to 100ms+ for several seconds every 11 seconds or so. It compromised any streaming type activity, such as video conferencing or cloud gaming.

Today it irritated me enough that I actually dug into it, learning that there is a feature on Apple devices called Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) which forcefully changes the channel of your wifi chipset periodically if necessary to (speculatively?) connect with other Apple devices. In the case given I'm seeing these spikes while simply using my Mac and not actively or intentionally using AWDL functionality -- I'm not pasting files across devices, screen casting, etc -- but still the jumps to 100ms or worse (sometimes 300ms+).

AWDL has a fixed set of channels that it uses, and by setting my home wifi router to the same channel AWDL uses (149 for 5Ghz in NA), it no longer performs the channel hopping and my ping is a constant sub-4ms, averaging about 2ms. Huge improvement.

Logically this means that there would be interference, and indeed some vendors recommend avoiding the AWDL channels preemptively, but using the AWDL functions like pasting across devices and I see no negative impact on my other wifi consumers.

https://www.threads.net/@dwforbes/post/C3saGR6Ok3t