I've installed OpenWrt 22.03.0-rc1 in the TP-Link Archer C6 v3.20 router (MediaTek MT7621 - ramips/mt7621). I've done this because I want to put a script to disable wifi radios at night.
The router is connected to my 1gbps fibre OTN. When I connect to the Archer using Ethernet in my computer, I get +-900mbps down/up speeds, so I think it mostly works fine (I enabled software/hardware flow offloading in Network/Firewall).
But using 5Ghz wifi, the download speed with all the devices I have is bound to +-350mbps. It is a MediaTek MT7613BE 802.11nac chip which reports bitrate of 750 to 820mbps in the OpenWRT "Wireless" screen. It's using AC mode and 80Mhz, because if I chose 120Mhz, devices cannot connect.
Is there another thing I can try or a closed source driver I can install so I can improve the speed of this interface a little? Thanks!!
Edit: with a very modern smartphone, I can get 460mbps, but I still think I should get a lot more. Am I right?
fwiw, if you want faster wifi speeds, you may need to consider installing a separate wireless access point running OEM firmware for maximum performance. OpenWrt wireless is often inferior to OEM firmwares in my experience.
For my Xiaomi 4A Gigabit with 21.02.x, I recall routed speeds from WAN to ethernet LAN were
Not really, there is a difference between the advertized data link rate - and the effective throughput you can get at your clients. The advertized top speeds of modern routers are given with all rf chains used (3x3, 4x4, up to 8x8 for wifi6), but your clients are mostly 2x2 (notebooks, good phones), 1x1 (IoT, cheap phones, USB cards, cheap tablets, cheap notebooks, ...) or maybe 3x3 for very high-end notebooks. With 802.11ac, 2x2 (@80 MHz channel bandwidth) leaves you with 866 MBit/s link rate at most, which -in practice- allows you speeds (rule of thumb, roughly half) around 300-350 MBit/s, maybe 400 MBit/s under ideal circumstances.
If you want more than that, you either need to increase the number of rf chains (~antennas) on both client and AP - or move to 802.11ax/ wifi6.
If I chose 160Mhz, the interface doesn't even work. I cannot see the wifi in any of my devices, including a Samsung S22+ (Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax 2.4G+5GHz+6GHz, HE160, MIMO, 1024-QAM - Up to 2.4Gbps Download / Up to 2.4Gbps Upload)
160 MHz rarely works, half of your bandwidth always overlaps with the DFS range, meaning you're very suspectible to interference and radar events (and false radar events, caused by interference from your neighbours). Unless you're in a shielded rf lab, live in the sticks far away from airports, ports, military, weather stations and neighbours or can use the 6 GHz band (even shorter range, fewer competition), you'd be better of with 80 MHz channels.
The more you push it (160 MHz), the more you challenge hardware, firmware and drivers, some will stand the pressure better than others.
in my case, with a totolink a8000ru, i set channel 36, width 160Mhz. My phone is a samsung S20, and it connects using 80Mhz. not 160Mhz but at least it can connects and it works...
if your radio doesn't even want to start, then there must be a bad setting combination somewhere ?
Thanks a lot for the help. I've tried all the combinations of channels with 160Mhz to no avail. Maybe with further fixes to drivers something more can be achieved. To be honest, the speed is lower than with the old router, but the perceived speed on my smartphone is better, so I'm ok with it.
I could try with future versions of OpenWRT if 160Mhz is available, but maybe as @slh said, it's not worth it. If I try it in the future and it works better, I'll update this thread.
"leaves you with 866 MBit/s link rate at most, which -in practice- allows you speeds (rule of thumb, roughly half) around 300-350 MBit/s, maybe 400 MBit/s under ideal circumstances"
And that's true: I get from 300 to 450 MBit/s. But why is that?