WiFi Optimization Guide
I had time to play around with my OpenWRT One wifi AP and achieved a fast and stable wifi connection in every single corner of my 3-story house and garden without a wifi repeater or second wifi AP. Let me share my findings with you, I will keep it short.
The first thing to check is if you can change the antennas of the router. For the OpenWRT One this makes a huge difference because it ships with cheap low gain antennas which are just perfect to keep the costs low and getting a FCC certification. Modern MU-MIMO routers use beamforming to boost the wifi quality and therefore need a similar radiation pattern for the used frequency range. You want an antenna that does exactly that like the alfa ars-nt5b7 (or the alfa ars-wifi6e-m2).
The second thing to check is the alignment of your antennas. Inhouse the signal has to cross one or more walls and will spread in a chaotic way. You want your antennas to be 90 degree to one another and aligned to the x, y and z-axis to cover as much as possible. You also want to avoid bad reflections and therefore you align your antennas in a 17 degree angle in the x, y and z-axis to the walls.
After doing this the SnR you need for a good connection will be significantly lower and the connection will be rock stable. For someone wanting to do gaming or game streaming over wifi this is a good starting point for AQL tweaking and getting close to the ping, jitter and stability of an ethernet connection.
If you are ok with reduced max speed for your wifi n and older devices you can disable the "short preamble" setting in the OpenWRT wifi settings to get higher speeds for those devices with weak or distorted signal instead.
All this is also true for other wifi devices. If you want an absolute perfect connection to one device you can also go through these tweaks for it.
That's basically it. You now don't need to amass wifi APs anymore.
In case someone wants to print my base for the OpenWRT One, here is the download link to the stl file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MiIoPH3SjABSWja_7vrQ8wXp6CohVi_D/view?usp=sharing