Poor WiFi performance when bridged with VLAN on Archer C7

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of when configuring my Archer C7 as a bridged access point? Currently I'm bridging both radios onto a tagged VLAN which goes to my router. I'm getting less than 100Mbps over WiFi, but wired Ethernet on another tagged VLAN gets 900MBps (so I don't think it's the router's firewall rules or handling of VLANs).

3

On an Archer C7 on a wired network, using VLANs for everything, my 5 GHz clients can easily saturate my Comcast 300/30 Mbps service. Nothing out of the ordinary in the config of the VLAN-specific bridges or wireless, that I know of.

config wifi-device 'radio24'
        option type 'mac80211'
        option channel '1'
        option hwmode '11g'
        option path 'platform/ahb/ahb:apb/18100000.wmac'
        option htmode 'HT20'
        option require_mode 'g'
#       option log_level 1
#       option disabled 1

config wifi-device 'radio5'
        option type 'mac80211'
        option channel '149'
        option hwmode '11a'
        option path 'pci0000:00/0000:00:00.0'
        option htmode 'VHT80'
        option require_mode 'n'

I'd "require ac", but the iPhone 5 in the house doesn't support 802.11ac :frowning_face:

(The paths are for ath79, but had no issues with ar71xx builds.)

4

Thanks for the data point Jeff. Are you bridging or routing between the 5GHz radio and the wired side? Just wondering whether there's still some hardware-specific slow path I'm falling into by bridging here vs. routing.

5

All five are bridged wirelessly over batman-adv riding on 802.11s on 5 GHz with multiple, tagged VLANs. One or two are also bridged to the wired network with multiple, tagged VLANs.

The Archer C7 v2 units, in general, can't handle much more than 500-700 Mbps through the Ethernet interfaces before the CPU can't keep up. Edit: This is typical of similar, single-core MIPS-based units.