5x speed improvement with no RSSI improvement

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

I did a broadband speed comparison between an ISP router, running ISP's default firmware and a high-end recent router with beamforming technology, running openWrt.

The improvement in download speed, at a distance of about 8 meters, through thick wall, was much stronger than I expected.

ISP provides 100 Mb download.
on ISP router : RSSI about -70 dBm, download speed 0.8 Mb/s
on openWrt router : RSSI about -66dBm, download speed 4 Mb/s

  1. I am assuming the beamforming technology's effect is fully represented in the RSSI, is that correct?
  2. Is the RSSI imprvement of about 4 dBm responsible for most of this 5x speed improvement?
  3. Or is there some other crafty magic there?
2

Speed depends also on noise level, quality and calibration of internal radio hw and algorithms that select modulation type, channel width, etc.

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