I personally have no experience with MediaTek devices. I recently considered buying one, but skimming through some of the support threads here about it, it's wifi support or performance just didn't seen as mature and reliable to me, so I dismissed the idea. Your mileage will vary, obviously.
(Note: I only looked at the kernel tree up to version 5.10 since this is the version OpenWrt currently backports its wireless drivers from. It might be well the case that newer kernel releases and OpenWrt versions will have MU-MIMO/beamforming support for other MediaTek devices as well.)
The kernel log also mentions support for mt7615 chipsets which support MU-MIMO/beamforming as well. But I couldn't find any hint as to whether those features are actually supported by the driver. But since OpenWrt developer @nbd is listed as one of the maintainers of the MediaTek kernel support, maybe he can chime in and give a more accurate assessment of the MediaTek Wave 2 wireless support in general.
The link given shown the information was back in 2017, is it still suffers the current drawbacks?
Those were the early days when the 1st MU-MIMO introduced into Wave2 802.11AC routers.
I mean, I hope they have sorted out the problem in 802.11AX routers.
If that's true it adds another one to the many ifs and ifnots on the client and router side adding to the problem of closed/open source drivers for the chipsets (and perhaps revision number of the chipsets ;- )
So you are suggesting don't pursue in the path of getting the "truth" because there will never be revealed
since the drivers are closed source - firmware blob?
As a OpenWrt user, take it as it is.........don't expect answer, because the truth is something that is out there (floating)
You cannot enjoy the full features of Beamforming + MU-MIMO. -> Accept it as a fact.
It is a grey area. Like Area 52 in US.
MU-MIMO seems to (kind off) work as long as you are using narrow (as in 20MHz) channels and have a lot of clients.
Basically, a typical business 5GHz installations with multiple AP's and channel reuse might actually have some gains. Especially if they can control the device hardware.
For a home user with two-three devices streaming Netflix over wide channels, not so much.
I am talking about .ac implementation in wave 2 devices. Whether it is OpenWRT or stock does not really matter, as it mostly function of WiFi firmware. Unless you are rolling enterprise .ac multi-AP OpenWRT WLAN network with 20MHz (reused) channels, you can as well ignore MU-MIMO. It will not improve your typical Youtube stream at home.
There are very few .ax capable OpenWRT devices and there are no meaningfull penetration of .ax gear in business space (where MU-MIMO theoretical gains can be fully utilized) so there are no benchmarks as yet. So we do not know yet if it is doing any meaninful difference.
No, not at all. If you or anyone is willing to setup a valid test environment with choosen router and clients you can measure some usefull data regardless if it is closed or open source. Until then no good facts are available e.g. the linked Small Net Builders test with a number of clients set to 50-60 isn't very helpfull nor typical for average home users.
Would you able to share your experience in regards to your OpenWRT based Belkin RT3200 routers?
How did you come into the conclusion that all the following 7 items mentioned above work?
Could you elaborate what the actual issues are?
1-5 are technologies or features, but you don't mention any issue related to them.
6&7 could be described as issues, although I think with 6 you're mixing up things. Whenever OpenWrt adds support for anything, it is based on open source drivers. ath11k is, for example, an open source driver for 802.11ax wireless devices. You probably mean that these open source drivers still rely on closed firmware, just like ath10k does.
Regarding 7: The idea is nice. But I don't think it's realistic or even technically the best way to go for three reasons:
First, in order to do this kind of target-specific optimization work, the developers would have to own or have access to all those supported devices and then, of course, spend time on testing and optimizing them. Second, whether you achieve 400Mbps with OpenWrt and 500Mbps with the vendor-firmware may not be all that important for some or even many users as long as it works and offers reasoable security. Third, OpenWrt tries to simplify and abstract wireless configuration quite a bit. If you ever have manually configured hostapd, you should be aware that this is far from intuitive. And it's sometime hard to impossible to find good, understandable information or documentation for all the configuration options. This is, I think, where OpenWrt shines. It takes away a lot of the complexity. If you ever have looked at the code that put's all these bits together (see e.g. /lib/netifd/hostapd.sh), you know that there is already some effort and magic going on in the backgroud to make it all work. Adding logic to make this really optimized for each device would make this code much, much more complex and hard to maintain. I actually think, it makes sense to not want to change this. For those who want optimal performance, I suggest to actually document the configuration or setup that you found for your device so that others can use that as a baseline for their own customization and optimization efforts.
@O_o All of that works in OpenWrt well or are you talkin the OEM firmware? That's very impressive if it's OpenWrt, had no idea support was that far along on this target. I'd get one if there was a USB 3.0 port, I use that daily with samba4 (get about 120 MB/s read-write which is fantastic) on my WRT32X.
@silentcreek I just meant in very general terms a lot of devices have issues with a mixture of those items, not being target specific although mvebu comes to mind (very high performance target, one of the fastest on OpenWrt, but certainly wifi is not ideal). I understand what you're saying about #7 but it would still be great to have optimizations on the top few target people use.
My experience is one of the best purchases I made this year.
The MediaTek drivers have the best support to date and above explains how to know if those features work, although it was already known that the MediaTek drivers in OpenWrt support that.
The only "problem" (not a real problem) is that I had to use a new WiFi name and reconnect all the devices, when I switched from my old router to the new one, because that is recommended to avoid strange problems that happen when you use the OLD WiFi name and password when switching to different routers, firmwares or WiFi drivers.
yes i have belkin rt3200 and is the best wifi router i playing to video games with and it work very well i waiting a luci 21.02 stable if he out he will a good news
Yes. We know. Judging from the way and frequency you're gushing about them one could be forgiven to believe you're a teenage girl and RT3200 is a Korean boy band. The only thing that's missing is you posing them for group pictures and creating Belkin RT3200 memes ... oh wait.
