I have an old Asus RT-N16 with BCM4718 radio.
I installed the OpenWRT version for device - openwrt-19.07.5-brcm47xx-mips74k-asus-rt-n16-squashfs.trx
Now the radio shows up as a 'bg' radio, not a 'bgn' and works, but slow - about 6mbps.
This is confusing as I thought I read somewhere that drivers for this device has been developed well.
But then on the same web page it tells you what not to do, but I don't know what to do - "Do not activate multiple drivers at once. The first driver loaded takes precedence and it's not easy to control which one that is. With other Linux distributions, you could blacklist the unneeded drivers. In OpenWrt you should make sure they are not installed using opkg, which automatically removes them from the /etc/modules.d/ directory."
How should I-
(1) install a different driver?
(2) get OpenWRT to use only that driver?
(3) check what driver is being used?
b43 works great for b/g wireless chipsets, but even if it may provide basic support for newer ones, it doesn't support HT rates - limiting the throughput to 54 MBit/s. That is not going to change in the future either.
Same thing here, I have an old device thats 11n capable but using openwrt with b43 wifi driver, im getting at most 10Mbps out of it, link is at 54Mbps btw. I was expecting at least 20Mbps...
From my original post, on https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/hardware/soc/soc.broadcom.bcm47xx?s[]=bcm4718 it says- "... you should make sure they are not installed using opkg, which automatically removes them ..."
I originally thought this meant install the drivers without using opkg - which made no sense as all instructions use opkg.
I'm thinking now that may have been intended to be- "... you should make sure they are UNINSTALLED using opkg, which automatically removes them ..."
Then it makes sense - uninstall unused drivers, and install only the ones you want - all with opkg.
Some instructions for doing this are-
They both gave 'n' support to the device, with slightly more average bandwidth (10-15Mbs) but lots more peak (150Mbs) - still very slow for 'n'.
Neither option seemed to support using the radio as an AP and a station(WAN) simultaneously. The setup said it was ok but the radio would keep dropping out.
Adding a usb wifi for the station(WAN) connection caused erratic behaviour, and the main radio to slow down to 2Mbs average, with the peak still being much higher.
So for what I was intending (wifi WAN and wifi LAN) the best I have got is a default OpenWRT installation (b43 drivers) + usb wifi(WAN). This gives 6Mbs average.
If anyone gets substantially better, please let me know.