Unstable 5GHz WiFi on TP-Link Archer A6 v3 with OpenWrt 21.02.01

Installing and Using OpenWrt Network and Wireless Configuration
1

Hi,

I flashed the router recently, and tried configuring the 5GHz Wifi. However the 5Ghz WiFi is quite unstable, with download speeds like 20 Mbps and sometimes even dropping to as low as 1 Mbps, whereas on stock firmware I used to get around 80 Mbps consistently.

Furthermore, webpages often stop loading on OpenWrt firmware. Refreshing the browser makes them load. Video streaming also suffers, with constant freezes and buffering every few minutes.

I tried enabling software and hardware flow offloading, changing WiFi channel to 36, changing MTU to 1460 and 1450, and other things but I cannot replicate the WiFi performance as on stock firmware.

I also noticed OpenWrt firmware does not seem to support beamforming / MU-MIMO. I mostly use my devices at about a distance of 10 meters from the router. Maybe beam forming and MU-MIMO are helping with the performance on stock firmware.

How can I fix the WiFi performance on 5 GHz with OpenWrt?

2

The radio (MT7613BE) is unfortunately not too stable but this should improve with more recent builds (a 21.02.2 release is expected soonish). See the mailing list.

1 Like
3

WiFi on 5 GHz band completely stopped working for me now. Power cycling the router temporarily fixed it earlier, if I can really correctly.

Awaiting the new release eagerly.

4

I tried the snapshot builds (Feb 11 and Feb 15/16) to check the WiFi performance on 5 GHz band. I even read these builds should include the updated WiFi driver.

However, the performance of 5GHz WiFi is quite similar to the stable OpenWrt build, and still not close to the performance on stock firmware. Beam forming and MU-MIMO is still not supported by OpenWrt for this router.

I had really hoped to use OpenWrt, but I may have to revert to the stock firmware until these issues are fixed in OpenWrt.