[sgtnoodle]

That's actually a hobby of mine, where I look for 5-10 year old forum posts recommending "new" hardware with good OpenWRT support. I order one on eBay for $30, then try it out myself. I now have 3 very stable 802.11ac access points across my home, and a WPS bridge capable of hitting 500Mbps of TCP throughput.

I do suggest using the latest generation client chipsets with driver support in your OS, though. Whether or not a newer client radio talks to a similarly capable AP, it is likely to have better receive sensitivity than older radios.

I also suggest specifically buying Intel client radios. I have first-hand benchmarking experience that shows that Intel radios are very good at receiving marginal radio frames in heavily congested environments. Qualcomm and Broadcom radios might be just as good, but I wasn't able to evaluate them for lack of driver support for my purpose. Realtek/Mediatek/Ralink radios have pretty good drivers, but the actual radios behave notably worse with congestion. I've had friends living in apartments take my advice and switch from Realtek to Intel, and they've reported back significant gains in wifi stability. I'll also note that the original Steam Deck has a Realtek radio, and many people complain about its mediocre Wifi performance. Some people have gone as far as hot air reworking their Decks to have 802.11ax Intel radios, which happen to be pin compatible.

[Avamander]

For $30 you can already get used enterprise access points. No OpenWRT, but they perform way better than 500Mbps. Even the ones that are now five or more years old.

[sgtnoodle]

I just want to make sure we're comparing the same thing, since data rates are such a nuanced topic. I have two 802.11ac APs communicating at 866Mbps link rate, via two spatial streams at 80Mhz of channel bandwidth. The APs bridge Ethernet traffic using WDS. I can measure 500Mbps of sustained TCP throughout over that wireless link. I believe that's pretty much the theoretical limit for the link rate.

Are you suggesting there are some good cheap APs that can readily do WDS with more than two spatial streams, or wider channel bandwidth? That could be fun to play with, although at this point my WDS link is just for the lols because I've since run cat6 between buildings...

[joshspankit]

Also curious on the details of your recommendation