WRT3200ACM on OpenWrt 19.07 branch - slow wifi

Installing and Using OpenWrt Network and Wireless Configuration
1

Hi,

On the v18 branch of OpenWRT - the wifi was fast and I had no issues. My broadband speed is 300Mbs down, with 30 Mbs up and checking via fast.com - I'm able to get this full speed easily on wifi.

I upgraded to v19.07 using the upgrade path in terminal.

Wifi speed via fast.com is now giving me a very variable rate of between 1Mbs to 90Mbs at best, never over 100Mbs. The average is usually around 20-30Mbs.

The wifi configuration have not been changed at all (I upgraded to v19 because I wanted to eventually use WPA3).

For what it's worth, the wifi is certainly the issue because if I test via the ethernet ports, it's giving full speed. I plugged in a BT Smart Hub 2 and used it as an wireless access point only (the Linksys remains the modem) and I'm able to get full speed via fast.com using the smart hub as the wifi AP.

I wonder if anyone else have upgraded their Linksys to v19 and have experienced this slowdown of wifi?

Cheers

2

fwiw, WPA3 is borked on the rango

Edit: this was just meant as a heads up, should the only reason be for the move was to get WPA3.

3

Did you have changed some wifi settings? Maybe WPA2/3 mixed? Did you have switched to wpad-openssl? Apart the WPA3 problems, that I cannot verify, many devices have problems on WPA 2/3 mixed WiFi. Or those devices not connect to WiFi or go very slow.

4

Thanks for the quick replies - I should have clarified - I haven't changed any wifi settings with the upgrade to v19.07 branch - it's still on WPA2 and I've not installed any additional packages that would be required for WPA3.

The only change really is the upgrade from v18 to v19 of OpenWRT.

5

I didn't experience any slowdowns on 19.07, however WiFi was flaky to a point where my Pixel 3a XL would lose connection and wouldn't be able to reconnect to WiFi from time to time. Very similar experience to the 17.07 without updated mwlwifi driver/firmware.

So I've rolled back to 18.06.6 and with the same version (built by eduperez) of mwlwifi driver/firmware as on 19.07 it's been rock solid for me.

6

I have been using the snapshot builds for a long time and I have no problem. You can give it a try and see if it improves. I have a 1Gb down / 100Mb up connection and with 5GHz WiFi I arrive at 600 Mb down and 100 Mb up.

7

There has been an issue with WMM settings, which will be fixed for 19.07.1 (to be expected in ~1-2 days).

1 Like
8

Thanks all...I'll take a look at the snapshot builds, but no rush, I can wait for the WMM updates as mentioned by @slh and then take a look at the snapshots if no joy.

If all else fail, I will probably do a backup and then do a fresh install from the 2nd boot partition (linksys FW) rather than an upgrade patch and go from there.