Public wireless AP. 2.4GHz. Ram vs Streams

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

This is more of a general question.

Is having a higher ram more important than having more streams on a 2.4ghz wifi only AP? (No 5ghz)

Ex.
A 300mbps AP (2 streams) with 64mb ram.
VS
A 600mpbs AP (4 streams) with 16mb ram.

What device would do better with more and more device connecting?

Again this is just 2.4ghz wifi. On a 30mbps isp.

Tia

2

16 MB RAM haven't been supported since 2012 (and were effectively barely usable for at least 2 years before that), this is a hard no-go.

3

This is a general question.
Im not planning on installing openwrt.

4

“More and more devices connecting” suggests that underpowered, likely obsolete devices may not be a good choice.

Hard to recommend anything with less than 16 MB of flash or less than 128 MB of RAM these days. Suitable devices from reputable manufacturers start around US$20.

Edit:

Then ask the vendor(s), since 16 MB of RAM ain’t runnin’ any half-way current or secure Linux.

1 Like
5

More spatial streams the better. No, not because you have clients that can match 4x4 in 2.4ghz but because of RF design issues:

  1. even with 1 or 2 stream clients - more radios on the AP add gain, and 4-stream AP's are always 4-stream, so precoding helps here - RF diversity gain for the extra radio, and coding gain from MIMO
  2. However, there might be edge cases where an untested design in the lab whiteboard (IP protected) 4x4 radio loses to a robust real world battle tested 2x2 RF design.

RAM doesn't matter if you aren't using openwrt in "dumb ap mode" aka ghetto mode, which you stated above.

There are poor design cases with some ath10k radios with RAM problems but you qualify your statement as 2.4ghz only.

Enterprise "true" AP mode have linux bypassing kernel acceleration or "hardware acceleration" if their marketing teams find something to qualify it as such. An example would be the NSS sub processors (7200k pps in 64k! packets) in the ath 10k 999x and 998x series. Normal linux bypassing would be 640k pps on 1500k packet size, so probably around 100-150k pps on 64k packet size.

6

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