u/ReservateDweller

I'm new to game streaming but I have this expectation that the new Steam Machine will provide the perfect streaming experience for the living room, not even because of Steam Remote Play for which I hear has worse latency than Moonlight, but because of controller integration (CEC too of course).

So now I am on the reservation list for Steam Machine and would like to decide in advance if I am buying or not. If the community says I could get the same streaming experience with a mini pc I'll skip the Steam Machine.

I need to purchase one of those cards. Does somebody know if one of them has a metal backplate? It is not possible to tell it from the descriptions or from the pics I found.

Edit: I build sff so I can't just buy a longer model

I need to purchase one of those cards. Does somebody know if one of them has a metal backplate? It is not possible to tell it from the descriptions or from the pics I found.

So I bought a Keenetic KN-1812 to use it as an AP. I wanted Wifi7, a normal desktop device, no saucer, and I wanted Mediatek to be sure to have an OpenWrt compatible device and no fans. Keenetic ticked all the boxes and I bit the bullet.

Main motivation was a bad signal at one single spot in my apartment (I previously had Netgear XR500 on OpenWrt).

So, I first set up Keenetic on stock firmware as I figured OpenWrt support is too fresh yet. Turned Wifi7 and MLO on. The signal on that spot was ok on 2.4GHz, but unstable on 5GHz. My phone spent most of its time connecting and disconnecting 5GHz, so it was worse than ever.

Then I spent several weeks of experimenting and figured out I could turn MLO off and set the band steering on and set the rssi threshold on 5Ghz so the Keenetic would kick my phone out of 5GHz to at least have stable 2.4GHz. So this worked.

Then I figured out I could probably do this more elegantly on OpenWrt, where one can define thresholds inside the band steering config.

So I flashed OpenWrt on the Keenetic KN-1812.

Now I have better, more stable and faster (even Wifi-bufferbloat is better) 5GHz signal than ever. I haven't even bothered to touch band steering or anything.

Just wow.

So I updated to 25.12.3 and had to configure my OpenWrt One as wireless AP.

Tbh I thought I could do it without any help since I used OpenWrt for years. Tried, locked myself out. Found this page https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/wifiextenders/bridgedap , locked me out or reverted. Read again, found weird hints about connecting to Wifi if on OpenWrt One, locked myself out.

I'm using LuCi.

So I just flashed the last 24 version, everything worked and then I upgraded over sysupdate.

So everything is ok, but I'd like to know if there are some security feature or smth. of OpenWrt One that I should know about that is doing this to me.

EDIT: OK, I did another update, on my N100 x86. Was locked out again. I connected a monitor and a keyboard:

ifconfig br-lan showed Bcast 255.255.255.255 !!!

uci set network.lan.netmask='255.255.255.0'

uci commit network

/etc/init.d/network restart

fixed it

IDK, maybe it was my fault!? Setting static AP to x.x.x.x insted of x.x.x.x/24 !? But it worked before!?

I had a bad spot in my apartment (balcony behind a bathroom). Cables not possible, wireless repeaters or mesh I didn't like, expensive and latencies and stutter and it is a small spot so I waited for a while and now bought Keenetic KN-1812 because it has better 2.4GHz (4x4) than others and is Wifi7, and Mediatek with big cores so OpenWrt will probably work nicely one day (builds are already out, but I am running original firmware for now).

I connect per smartphone with WiFi7.

Before I had OpenWrt running on a Netgear XR500 (Wifi5). The connection in that weird spot was unstable, over 2.4Ghz only, and if there, very slow.

The 5GHz band is mostly almost empty here, 2.4Ghz up to 40% utilization in peak times (Keenetic has nice graphs for this).

So now I tried Wifi7, MLO on: very unstable 5-20Mbps 1x1x 2.4GHz + 1x1 5GHz sometimes under 1 sometimes breaking.

Tried everything, MLO on, off, band steering, Airtime fairness, spent days testing, but here what works and is stable:

Turned off MLO

Turned off 2.4GHz

Limited 5GHz to 40Mhz

Now I get 50Mbps in good times, 10 in bad times, always connected, never stutter.

I see connections from 1x1 20MHz to 2x2 40Mhz.

I measure with internet speed tests.

20Mhz never make more than 20Mbps, 40MHz at least 10-15, mostly 25-30, sometimes 50Mbps.

So, wow, speeds are here, but definitely not because of MLO or the good 2.4GHz of that Keenetic Titan (which influenced my purchase decision mostly). Higher modulation of Wifi7 is probably helping though.

MLO helping with a bad signal is just a nice theory, at least with devices that have only 2 radios, like phones.