[lexridge]

Yesterday, I decided to re-configure my EA8500 from scratch to hopefully fix some underlying issues I have been having, especially with WiFi speeds. My TCI Roku TVs connected to this router via 5ghz are reporting only 4Mb/s Internet connection while the TVs connected to a Netgear R7800 WAP are getting ~200Mb/s. Instead of resetting my main router and thus having many hours of downtime, I did the initial re-configuration on a freshly reset spare EA8500. Both routers are running r53562 firmware.

The first things I did was to set the IP address to not conflict with the main router and turn off DHCP to avoid having multiple DHCP servers on my network.

After that, I decided to do away with the startup commands for my VLANs (3 w/tags) and used the Switch Config GUI instead. This was my first time using this so I used an example from the VLANs sticky. Then I set up all the bridges for what was already configured (excluding WiFi at this point). All seems to be working well so far.

Next step was the WiFi. I am using both 5ghz and 2.4ghz, both with VAPs. Two VAPs on the 5ghz side and three on the 2.4ghz side, all VAPs are assigned to VLANs with their own respective DHCP servers.

- Something I noticed that seems odd. My Main router has TurboQAM, which I was not using. The refreshed router is lacking this setting, but says it is using it and doing nvram show | grep turbo returns that it is indeed ON. I assume I can turn this back off with the nvram set command.

- ESP8266 devices setting is missing as well. I was using it before, but they seem to connect okay without it.

- Also oddly enough, I did not set up the WDS Station to match the MAC address of the 5ghz side. I did however set it up on the refreshed router pointing to the WDS Station. However, it still connected even without having the AP(WDS) MAC entered. Weird!

And lastly, I copied over all my Adminstration/Commands from the Main router to this one, commenting out the VLAN startup stuff (but keeping it there for now just in case). This included all the Firewall settings as well. Then Services w/USB and NAT and SSH keys, etc. Then I saved the backup NVRAM configuration so I could transfer it to the Main router. The new NVRAM backup is 16KB smaller than the Main router's backup file. It should have been slightly larger considering I didn't actually remove any of my commands, only commenting them out. I am guessing that some old crap that was no longer needed is gone now.

Back to Main Router:
So I factory reset the Main EA8500 and proceeded to restore the backup from the EA8500 I had used for setup. All went well. Next I changed the Router IP back to the correct one and re-enabled the main DHCP server. All my wireless IoT devices, TVs and handhelds all connected instantly with their pre-assigned addresses. TVs also were getting a much faster connection as well ~131Mb/s. Still not even close to the speeds I am obtaining through the R7800 5ghz. However, when doing a speedtest on my phone (Pixel7a) connected to the Main EA8500 5ghz. While it starts out fantastic, around 400Mb/s it then steadely drops and by the end of the test it is down to about 3Mb/s.
I do the same test connected to the R7800, it holds throughout the entire test. Also, today all the tvs connected to the EA8500 are back to 4Mb/s. It should be noted that wired devices Internet speeds are right around 930Mb/s.

I am including a screen shot of my WiFi setup. Notice that TurboQAM is missing, but I think this is pretty much identical to the advised WiFi setting from the sticky here for Atheros.

[ho1Aetoo]

https://svn.dd-wrt.com/browser/src/router/libutils/libwireless/wl.c#L2624

[lexridge]

Thanks for your input. I have always used the Vanilla firmware and the TurboQAM has shown up in the past. I just kept it turned off as it was causing some issues with a few IoT devices. Now it's on and nothing is failing to connect, that I have noticed so far. I am going to turn it off again in NVRAM since that is apparently the only way to do that now.

However, I don't think this would have anything to do with my 5ghz speeds. I believe this is a 2.4ghz only setting and the only thing I use 2.4ghz for is IoT stuff and a goto for older devices. Not really a big deal. Just stuff I noticed after doing this.

[ho1Aetoo]

How do you know it's active?
The nvram variables are not meaningful, as far as I understand the code it disables TurboQAM when the vanilla firmware is used.

select the dd-wrt firmware for testing then you will see if TurboQAM appears

[lexridge]

Ah interesting. So I tried this on my spare router and your are right. The TurboQAM option is present with DDWRT and it disappears with Vanilla. However, the top of the page still shows:

Wireless Interface wlan0 [2.4 GHz TurboQAM] - QCA99X0 802.11ac - Max Vaps(16)

and

[lexridge]

Turning it off in nvram also removed the TurboQAM in the page header. So apparently while Vanilla firmware ignores it, somehow the page header does indeed read it.

[ho1Aetoo]

The following comment is written further down in the source code

[lexridge]

This has now gotten so bad that I cannot even play back high bitrate video from my in-house Plex server without major buffering. The Plex server is a hard wired gigabit connection. The only thing wireless in the chain are the (three) Roku TVs connected to the EA8500 5ghz. Only one is turned on at the moment. The TV connected via 5ghz to the R7800 does not exhibit this behaviour.

[lexridge]

Okay, so after attempting to get the wireless working well for nearly a month now, I decided to do the unthinkable and switched from Vanilla firmware to DD-WRT firmware (5ghz only). To my grand surprise, it fixed the speed issues.

Rather than using Speedtest over the Internet from a wireless device, I decided to test it between my main Linux computer (wired) and another EA8500 connected via WDS on 5ghz. Results are astounding!

Using Vanilla firmware:

[mrjcd]

E8500
r53562

I use VANILLA on the 2.4
and
DD-WRT for the 5GHz

all I have worky very good

reason VANILLA on 2.4 GHz is I have a couple devices (2.4 only) that don't like DD-WRT firmware.

03:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
will connect but will NOT do shit

oldass laptop:
07:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43142 802.11b/g/n (rev 01)
will NOT even connect to DD-WRT firmware at all NO-how NO-way

[lexridge]

While changing over to DD-WRT firmwire on the 5ghz side works fantastic, it doesn't make any difference on the 2.4ghz radio. Speedtest.net reports at best around 3Mb/s DL on 2.4ghz yet I am getting 51Mb/s upload speeds with it. Weird! I am getting 533Mb/s download on the 5ghz side from my Pixel 7a and about the same on a Samsung Galaxy tablet.

With wired connections, I am getting right at 908Mb/s without SFE. Not too shabby. Just wish I could figure out why it's so damn slow on 2.4!

[sope]

For my purpsoses. r53469 dated 09/08/23 is working fine for my ea8500 that is DHCP for IOT vlan and all wifi on it disabled. Its just the internet gateway through the wired backbone. I also have ea8500 on my Root Mesh point but I gave up on trying to get any speed out of the 2.4GH and the 5GHz radio is working great for 802.11s mesh.

With open source firmware, it appears to me that nobody is spending much time on 2.4GHz with the neweer routers which are actually old routers compared to newer routers but newwer that my old routers that have DD-WRT on them. (Does that make sense? Probably not so I probably should not be posting in technical forums. I'll bet it makes sense to somebody.)

Will I ever try to upgrade my ea8500s from r3469. Probably not unless I see someone with "guru status on here" say they did and their router is doing flaming speeds on both wireless channels. Othwrwise, I have no need to risk pulling my hair out once again. I will work around the issue. Actually I will likely replace the archer C7v4 with one of the spares i have with broadcom chipset. They will work exceptionally well as a 2.4GHz AP.

I have a few videos posted on YouTube about how I am using my routers and working to find the best position for all of them on my 2 VLANS (one is 802.11s Mesh for IOT) that I have acumulated for cheap off ebay or from recycling center over the years. If you can put up with my crazyiness you can find me on youtube by searching DD-WRT 802.11s Mesh and or ea8500 ,etc. (TheAntiCLoud. don't use any spaces becasue those are other crazy people and not me).

[lexridge]