Thanks for that link, I had not seen that page (probably because it’s under “Installing additional software” ). With talk about reusing old Wifi routers as WAPs I had assumed others would have had the same idea, and thus hoped to find a prebuilt device-specific firmware. Looks like another steep learning curve for me, so wait until it’s not my only WAP.
I use a different Wi-Fi Analyser app, which shows signal strength - but not how much data is being broadcast on that frequency. If you have a couple of neighbours streaming high quality video (because the sales droid told them that since the media centre and TV sitting next to each other both have wi-fi so no need to buy a cable), then there isn’t so much “free air time” available; and yes your devices are programmed to re-transmit … up to a point. I see the key question being how much free air is available … and even with a scanner that is sniffing packets that changes minute by minute.
I agree - there are plenty of factors that are impossible to see and/or difficult to quantify … making wi-fi more of a black art than a science. And as you point out there are also issues like bufferbloat which the end user is rarely aware of.
About the amount of clients, i can’t find a number but I can assure you it’s working fine with my 45 devices at the moment. Where more that half of those devices are 2.4ghz devices.
I really enjoyed reading your discussion as I share the same questions on this topic. I am simply looking for an inexpensive wifi router that can manage multiple IoT devices (30-50+). I’m not looking for a high performance router, I’m not into gaming, I’m not into streaming 4k/8k, I just want to build an environment with Home Assistant and a lot of ESPHome sensors, smart switches, etc. For example, I will also have 12 x ESP32-CAM, 6 x ESPresense, 4 x BT-Proxies, etc.
Thank you @frits1980 for suggesting EAP653. Anyone has other suggestions or I’ll go with EAP653
I’d add in, consider coupling the WiFi base station with a pfsense router this way you can isolate, protect the IOT devices and see who and what data they are sending to the cloud.
Are you considering a AX3000 WiFi 6 device for use with esp’s only? That’s like getting a racing car with 300km/h top speed but staying on unpaved roads only and never go beyond 50km/h
While the device itself looks nice an probably offers great performance (specially for 5Ghz/Wifi6 devices - so not esp’s!) I couldn’t spot it as a supported device for openwrt which would make it a no go for me as I can’t fully own/control the device and future updates (including security fixes) are 100% depended from the manufacture. Beside advertising “cloud management” beside everyone knows that this is probably the worst idea to control a local network - ubiquiti could sing about it
If you need a only a WIFI AP for esphome devices I would check for a used device that is capable of running openwrt. For example a TP-Link N600 can be available used for $10 and is capable running the latest openwrt release
Beside esphome devices don’t talk to a cloud (when not configured so) it’s not even necessary to have a extra appliance for VLAN’s as openwrt supports this out of the box
Unfortunately these are totally irrelevant for IoT on 2.4GHz band I agree with orange-assistant that a more basic model, or even second hand should do the IoT job just as well. I personally opted for a new router which can run openwrt to keep my options open.
IoT devices are generally low bandwidth (only send short messages); however I would suggest you look closer at the bandwidth required for cameras; specifically video resolution x color depth x frame rate. For example 800x600 x 16bit colour x 10 frames/second = 9.6Mbps per camera just for the image.
Then add overhead and consider congestion … and that is what you know about because you are putting it on your LAN. Goodness knows how much interference is being generated by neighbours using the same frequency.
You might be better off considering several cheaper WAPs wired back to your router/switch to spread the load, or maybe a “mesh” system if it uses a separate channel for backhaul.
Whatever, you can almost guarantee that your mileage will vary from whatever the manufacturers and salesdroids tell you - it is your job to make sure it works for you in your environment.
As for EAP653 - I am renting, so didn’t even consider any ceiling mount devices.
To make a long story short, this project is not for a house, I will rent a 2400 Sq.Ft. floor in a mall where I will transform food products. It’s an old restaurant that will be converted into a 25% industrial floor + 75% commercial floor. I jumped into Home Assistant 1 year ago and started doing more and more ESPHome projects. I want to convert that old restaurant into a small but smart production factory. I will monitor everything and create dashboards accordingly, and thus I will have a lot of 2.4 Ghz micro-controller boards around with some smart switches and more.
When it came to choosing a router, I didn’t want to choose an overkill router with a high bandwidth performance, I want a router that will simply be able to manage and connect multiple IoT devices. I asked on different platforms for suggestions to help me choose a router that would meet these requirements and I ended up with 6 models. Since this thread was precisely talking about what I was wondering, and that there are some active folks here who took time to share their ideas, I thought I could at least take time to thank you and share the final decision.
First, I didn’t want a POE setup, it would have been too costly. Secondly, being able now or later to upgrade to OpenWRT was important. Finally, I looked at Mbps on the 2.4 Ghz band.
What a fascinating project you have there Vincent. I wish you every success with it (and hope you write it up as a case study when/if you have time).
I am a little surprised, given that you’re looking at a commercial premises where ceiling-mount APs would be ideal, and you may need multiple APs to cover that area. But it probably comes down to whether there are already spare power sockets in the ceiling cavity.
If you have to pay an electrician to run power cables through the ceiling cavity, you will probably find that the extra cost of POE devices and a POE hub is the cheaper alternative, given that you have to install the APs and run ethernet cable anyway. And I always recommend wired connections where feasible for speed and reliability, leaving wi-fi for those connections where wires are not feasible.
This sounds to me like marketing doublespeak. They do love to mix things up and misinterpret theoretical figures as though they were real-world benchmarks.
It also leaves the question of whether having faster speed means they have allowed more devices to be connected concurrently - which I believe is an arbitrary number of entries in a table in the AP software. I found all manufacturers very reluctant to give hard figures … which in turn seems suspicious
I had a quick look at the alternative firmwares, but none seemed to promote >32 wi-fi devices as a feature, even when promoting reuse of old APs - which I consider a real benefit in our IoT world.
Would be interesting to know the shape. For example it could be 15 by 15 meters which should be easily cover-able with one AP on the right spot.
Indeed. Probably dual stream (isn’t supported by esp’s afaik) as well as a “maximum” theoretical allowed per stream of 400 Mbps by the 2.4Ghz wifi clients (esp’s are limited to 72 Mbps afaik).
While multiple streams are always useful the claimed theoretical maximum throughput will never be reached by any esp (probably not even 1/10th of it).
A little bit like
Having chosen that particular device (over others) only because of the claim it has the highest theoretical throughput on 2.4Ghz wifi was clearly what netgear marketing wanted.
Still there is a high chance other devices on your list could (even advertising less theoretical maximum throughput) actually perform better for your particular scenario For example the same priced RT-AC68U is a 3 stream MIMO device that (in theory) should outperform your chosen 2(?) stream device.
In any way it should be more than enough for your use case
I’m not really familiar with stock firmware because first thing I typically do is to erase the vendor firmware which is often not only buggy and outdated but sometimes includes vulnerabilities or even backdoors
If you hit a wall which cause is software (limitations) you should be good after freeing your device. I think the limit in openwrt to hit would be to address all devices (DHCP) which will be limited to something around 16.000 (yes, that’s sixteen thousands in words) by default.
What happens when you connect client number 33 to your wifi AP? Does another device goes offline or doesn’t the new device connect all? If later what does the client says what the problem is (“couldn’t obtain ip”, etc.)? Maybe the DHCP is just set to 32 devices only?
When I hit 32 clients, the 33rd device will try to sneak in while I update a device on my network then the device being update won’t manage to make it back on the network. It becomes a game of who sneaks in first…
I managed to plug an extra router I had laying around as an AP and I can now get beyond the 32 devices limitations…
Are you sure about your 16.000 device claim? I doubt it can be achieved with custom firmware… We’re talking about active connection (connected devices) not only IP attribution on a network.
That’s obviously the software limit in openwrt - if your hardware runs into a bottleneck before (running out of RAM for example) you will never reach the maximum
I have no idea what limits your device but I can tell you that even super budget (<$10) usb powered pocket routers with only 32MB of RAM and 4MB Flash (the things you shouldn’t buy anymore) can have easily 50+ devices on the wifi radio (tested that myself years ago…)
Looks like your new router has it’s hand break activated or the manufacture messed up bad with the firmware (they actually to often ship buggy *ware that’s I don’t even waste time with that and always directly flash openwrt )
My main router is presently a Nighthawk R7200 and I just installed a cheap TL-WR841N as an access point for the main router. The cheap TL-WR841N with stock firmware has a maximum of 15 connected devices.
I have nothing against Openwrt FW, honestly I prefer custom firmware. I simply wanted to apply a quick solution before choosing a decent alternative to use as an AP.
Could you suggest a cheap router to use as an AP? That AP will not be use for any 5,0Ghz devices, I only want to connect 2.4Ghz IoT devices on that AP.
Pickup a used/refurbed TM-AC1900 and load DD-WRT or OpenWRT onto it. Danged reliable piece of hardware, I used two or three of them for many years before they finally succumbed to hardware rot.
Actually, they are 2 different predefined-size tables. The router’s DHCP table records what IP address it has issued to each device throughout the LAN it is controlling (though 16K sounds like a business grade device); whereas each Wireless Access Point keeps track of those devices which are directly connecting to it, over its wireless channel.
Back when 802.11B was the bees knees and all types of data was going through the wi-fi and RAM was expensive, 32 devices seemed a reasonable limit (or 16 for home-grade equipment). To have more devices simply add another WAP up the other end of the office/home.
But now every apartment and office has one or more WAPs (all trying to use the same 11 channels) - hence the rush back to 5GHz and lots of fancy tech to boost throughput. And IoT uses the old cheap 2.4GHz wifi modules. The market has changed, but manufacturers focus on selling new and better equipment.
I am using an old TL-WR743ND router as a secondary WAP. I don’t need or want most of the router functionality built into the default firmware, and had assumed that OpenWRT (or similar) may have a version trimmed down to WAP functionality - with the space previously reserved for other router data tables now available for keeping track of more Wi-Fi devices. No go! In fact old models are not supported because they don’t have enough memory for everything … fair enough, but no sign of a spin-off project or even a tutorial for using an old router as WAP only.
So much for using open source firmware to extend the useful life of old equipment
With newer openwrt version (v21, v22) indeed many “old” routers/ap were dropped due to space requirements for newer kernels. If your router has less than 8MB flash (which is the case with yours) you can not make use of newer openwrt versions.
Your TL-WR743ND with only 4MB of Flash (see the big fat warning on the site ) is limited to OpenWRT 18 which is old (and even end-of-life) but still much newer than the last firmware shipped from TP-Link which looks like to be 10 years old (from 2013) if I looked right.
Not really, I only have (dirt) cheap used and old stuff in use. But why not convert (free ) one of your devices (both look like to support openwrt) to see if you can break free of the limits
). With talk about reusing old Wifi routers as WAPs I had assumed others would have had the same idea, and thus hoped to find a prebuilt device-specific firmware. Looks like another steep learning curve for me, so wait until it’s not my only WAP.
but staying on unpaved roads only and never go beyond 50km/h 
I agree with orange-assistant that a more basic model, or even second hand should do the IoT job just as well. I personally opted for a new router which can run openwrt to keep my options open.
afaik).
) one of your devices (both look like to support openwrt) to see if you can break free of the limits 