Good evening, I have an Archer C2600 that variously identifies as V1.0 or V1.1. I have installed the following firmware and am operating it as a pass through AP.
At present this device seems limited to 32 active clients. Is it possible to configure it to manage more? Google search suggests editing " Maximum Associated Stations (or max clients)" which I am not able to find in settings. (Network -> Wireless, click the edit button for the SSID, then the Advanced settings tabs at top and bottom.)
32 STAs is a hard(ish) limit of the ath10k-ct firmware (and frankly, of 802.11ac era hardware in general).
However, there are ways to reconfigure the ath10k-ct firmware memory map (that is deep in the guts of driver/ firmware) to extend this limit slightly, please use the forum search about the details (I faintly remember that this has been discussed before); there are drawbacks.
32 STAs is a hard(ish) limit of the ath10k-ct firmware
I was afraid of that. I went down the OpenWrt path because my other AP (ASUS AC68W) failed, dropping most clients. I bought a cheap 802.11n router to replace it and found that it was limited to 32 clients. Before that arrived I configured a Pi 4B and Intel NUC with hostapd and found they both had even lower limits. I was hoping that OpenWrt might get me beyond that, but if the limit is imposed by blobs or firmware on board the radio, OpenWrt can't help. I suppose that's the price I pay for going with consumer grade H/W.
Luckily, the APs were cheap on ebay so I bought the C2600 and an Archer C7 1750 V2. I've swapped the C7 in and it picked up 34 clients so at least it exceeds the 32 client limit.
I'm planning on reworking my home LAN and thinking about using two APs for IoT stuff and perhaps I can configure this as a mesh (with Ethernet backhaul.)
I did some searching and these discussions seems relevant:
Keep in mind that, especially on 2.4 GHz, there's also an airtime limit, of the management traffic itself reaching/ exceeding the available airtime. This even more pronounced on slower standards and with legacy rates enabled (management frames are transmitted at the lowest allowed bitrate).
Just keep in the back of your mind what was common when these standards were designed, how many wireless clients did you have active when 802.11n was kind (I doubt more than 5-10). The proliferation of IoT/ smarthome and always connected personal device only started in 802.11ac times and 802.11ax in greenfield mode significantly extended on this (802.11ac didn't touch 2.4 GHz at all).
That one only has 'old' 802.11n ath9k chipsets, rather flexible and well supported driver, but challenged on the hardware side (802.11n) - as mentioned, airtime and no greenfield mode are an issue.
The WLAN cards of the (all) RPi(s) is a very low-end client-oriented chipset, with quite severe limitations (I think <5, 8 at most). These days (802.11ac and up), we do see significant differences in capabilities and features between 'cheap' client-oriented chipsets and expensive AP-oriented ones.
tl;dr: get a well supported 802.11ax chipset and configure it for greenfield mode - this gives you 'best' results. Especially without that, airtime is a problem - as are chipset-, firmware- and driver capabilities. Distributing the client load over multiple APs and channels (airtime is shared among everyone, including your neighbours) is advisable.
Not to be pedantic here, but that is not mesh. Precision in terminology is critical, but unfortunately the marketing teams from many of the consumer wifi brands have confused the idea of a true mesh (wireless backhaul) with the idea of high performance roaming between APs.
Mesh, strictly speaking, refers to a wireless backhaul using the 802.11s standard (or a variant thereof since some vendors have their on 'take' on the standard).
When you are using an Ethernet backhaul, you are not using 802.11s/mesh. You are simply setting up additional bridged APs (sometimes called Dumb APs) to increase your coverage area; your clients will roam between the APs as needed.
Ethernet backhaul is always recommended if it is possible -- the performance is almost always better and certainly more predictable using ethernet over wireless.
I was hoping that OpenWrt might get me beyond that, but if the limit is imposed by blobs or firmware on board the radio, OpenWrt can't help. I suppose that's the price I pay for going with consumer grade H/W.