Recommendation WDS 2x Routers Wpa3 Wifi6 min. 4x Gbit ports

[linuxuser]

I am reading this thread with lots of interest. I am having a similar situation, but some things are weird, I can try only.

@timothyjward

To add another alternative - the ZyXel WSM20 (Multy M1 in some geographies) is a good cheap option.

Found the ZyXEL WSM20 (Multy M1) for 50€ / 2 pcs. The advantage of the WSM20 are more than 1 Ethernet port. I need 2. I bought 3 D-Link DAP-X1860 AX1800 Mesh Wi-Fi 6 Range Extender, easy to flash with Openwert, but only 1 Ethernet port, but can be plugged directly into the socket.

So does everything work with the WSM20, especially 802.11s(d)?

At the moment I am using WDS, but with different SSIDs. I was not happy with the same SSID. I often was connected to the weaker device. But this is a long time ago.

@timothyjward

It’s available in the 23.05 release candidates

It looks like it is now more stable, since it is at 23.05.2

https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05.2/targets/ramips/mt7621/

Following https://openwrt.org/toh/zyxel/wsm20 you need to do 2 steps mainly:

Go to http://192.168.212.1/gui/#/main/debug/firmwareupgrade

Flash https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05.2/targets/ramips/mt7621/openwrt-23.05.2-ramips-mt7621-zyxel_wsm20-initramfs-kernel.bin

Reboot

scp -O openwrt-23.05.2-ramips-mt7621-zyxel_wsm20-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin root@192.168.1.1:/tmp/:
sysupgrade -n

@timothyjward

Signal range is good to very good. I get full signal from 2.4 GHz at approximately 25 metres

Dreaming of this. I assume there is something wrong here with the environment, 2m close to the upstream router is more worse than 10m. So I have to try, no idea if 802.11s can help, no idea if Wifi 6 helps.

@Steffffi

In WDS, you just insert the MAC of each router into the other router with same channel, ssid, etc, like link them,but both are in different location and both have full access to ethernet. No routes required but as a result, you can have one single Wifi and you dont loose bandwidth like with a wifi repeater. Roaming included.

Normally I setup WDS with an editor without luci. If you have one working, the others are more or less copy and paste. But I never tried it with roaming.

I thought I need 802.11s to use 802.11r, when the devices are wireless connected?

@eginnc

As the article goes on to explain, this reduction in speed can be avoided with a repeater bridge; but only if you dedicate one of your two radios (2.4 GHz or 5 GHz) to that bridge and do not use the bridge radio for wireless client connections.

Hmmh, not sure if I did something right without knowing why. The connection from my upstream router is very bad. In theory 5GHz are possible, but it is a very weak signal, so I use 2.4GHz and now I have changed the connected routers / extender to 5 GHz, seems a little bit more faster, but still not excellent. Did a lot of iperf-testing.

@eginnc

We are simply suggesting you may be able to do even better if you can wire your devices together with Ethernet back haul instead of wirelessly using WDS.

That's what I did, but unfortunately the most important area in the house cannot be connected via ethernet.

I am going to read this post a few times, to be sure, that I understood what you said.

Looks like 802.11s could not be necessary. WDS is running, so can I do a quick test with 802.11s(d) by editing config files? I know I have to change the firmware with atheros-devices and use "non-ct". But it looks like I am changing all devices to AX. This double-pack from Zyxel could be a good deicision.

How do you see the ZyXEL WSM20 (Multy M1) compared to the Asus Asus RT-AX53U https://openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-ax53u Please answer at MT7915 vs MT7905 vs MT7975: ZyXEL WSM20 vs. Asus RT-AX53U