Faster wifi with 1043nd V1

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kabi
Posts: 30
Joined: Thu Aug 28, 2014 5:33 am

Re: Faster wifi with 1043nd V1

Post by kabi »

ispyisail wrote: New routers will become available very soon

At the the current time the best routers for any speeds above 50mbps +/-

WRT1200AC v1 (Caiman)
WRT1200AC v2 (Caiman)
WRT1900AC v1 (Mamba)
WRT1900AC v2 (Cobra)
WRT1900ACS v1 (Shelby)
WRT1900ACS v2 (Shelby)
WRT3200ACM v1 (Rango)

With Openwrt/Gargoyle CPU power is king with fast internet connections
So when you link these - what is the usefulness of this pretty expensive HW when OpenWRT does not have full access to chips in use - so can't use native hw NAT ?

How can OpenWRT actually use all those advertised features ?

Is the MU MIMO actually working (so it's hidden hw magic) - or these features are only available with official firmware and once flashed to OpenWRT it becomes 'dumb/standard' router ?

There are couple boards like Banana-PI R2 or some Turris composable router from components - where the standard Linux distro with all 'extended' functionality can be used - but likely can't match in performance of MU MIMO WiFi coverage.

ispyisail
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Joined: Mon Apr 06, 2009 3:15 am
Location: New Zealand

Re: Faster wifi with 1043nd V1

Post by ispyisail »

yeah, I agree

We all need to make that choice for ourselves

Gargoyle is about cheap routers with good firmware. The problems started when internet speeds increased.

When we start getting into expensive hardware other firmware becomes an option.

I've played with other firmware but I keep coming back to gargoyle.

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Wagner
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Mar 14, 2019 7:44 pm
Location: Brazil

Re: Faster wifi with 1043nd V1

Post by Wagner »

Hello!

I just registered to say that by removing the middle antenna on my old WR1043ND v1.x I was able to reach 120MBits but it didn't stick.

Soon after it came back to the 30MBit transfer limit.

Despite going back to the hardware transfer limit, it was very interesting to see this weird solution.

Thank you for sharing the idea.
kabi wrote:So I did some more investigation around strange HT40 usability.
Here are some more notes. I'm now running some latest 'beta' Gargoyle build from march.

1.) Whenever txantenna option is specified - it MUST be also given with rxantenna option. Valid setting for rxantenna is only '7'. For txantenna values 1..7 can be selected. When just only one option is given OR invalid value is used, these settings are simply ignored and any previous setting remains set in driver (that could have influenced my previous tests actually) - so this behavior is a bit unexpected.

2.) Since acceptance/usability of some WiFi channels looked strange to me, I've checked capacitors and one seemed a bit bloated so I've replaced it - but there are lot of them without any 'blowing part' in the middle so it would be probably hard to recognize if they are bad and I'm not going to replace them all ;)

Anyway after replacement it seemed to be still same having 'weird' HT40 issues, but maybe channel usage seemed to improve a bit.

Further checking for possible trouble making options - it looks like dropping everywhere suggested lines from wireless config:
  • list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
    list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
actually made Windows boxes on the network happier.


But the most revealing part is probably that physically disconnecting 'the middle' antenna and using just 2 corner ones made it actually faster! With this setup and HT40 setting I've been able to reach over 100mbps in the single room mainly when the machine was 'alone' and has not shared networks with other devices. On the other hand 'older' devices then looked running slower (like just 8mbps). So I guess using HT20 with 3 antennas in place is reasonable compromise where 'fastest' boxes gets ~70mbps, middle level oldish phones ~30mbps and G devices are still over 18mbps.

ATM I'm not sure if 'the middle' antenna issue is a sign of approaching HW problem (it's aged device used 24x7) or it's 'by-design' how to serve '11n' only devices that fast - but in combined world it's way more limited. But still need to do more testings - now with better knowledge how those rx/txantenna options do behave and 2 or 3 antennas attached - lots of combination to benchmark so when one doesn't want to annoy home users ;) it will take a while...

So yeah, probably time to think also about its replacement and 'Archer C7 ac1750 v2' actually does look quite interesting.

kabi
Posts: 30
Joined: Thu Aug 28, 2014 5:33 am

Re: Faster wifi with 1043nd V1

Post by kabi »

Wagner wrote:Hello!

I just registered to say that by removing the middle antenna on my old WR1043ND v1.x I was able to reach 120MBits but it didn't stick.

Soon after it came back to the 30MBit transfer limit.
Have you been testing with locally connected computers and iPerf ?

Such bandwidth test do need local network connection - using remote connection such as 'speedtest.net' may influence testing (depending on the quality of provided connection)

120Mbps is border speed for the router and its chip-set (reaching 100% CPU utilization - original tp-link firmware is able to use hw acceleration better)

But anyway I keep using all 3 antennas for 'wider' overage - just with those tx/rx options and perpendicular orientation of both corner antennas as mentioned earlier in the thread.

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