I’m using GL-AR300M in Router mode and experiencing the following issue: after a long video call (>= 1.5 hours) Wi-Fi becomes unstable. The longer call is the more unstable Wi-Fi becomes. Sometimes it comes to the point where authentication on Wi-Fi starts timing out.
There are a few things I noticed:
If I don’t make any video calls Wi-Fi works stably for days (downloading files form internet doesn’t seem to break it)
Trying to monitor traffic with tcpdump I noticed that when Wi-Fi is unstable network packets from Wi-Fi to laptop/mobile seem to go well, however packets from laptop/mobile rarely reach Wi-Fi device
Disabling WMM seem to help avoiding this problem however disabling it seems to limit Wi-Fi network bandwidth
Upgraded to the latest version of OpenWRT (openwrt-19.07.3-ar71xx-generic-gl-ar300m-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin specifically). There is a feeling that overall network is faster and more stable however WiFi issues didn’t go anywhere. Here is how I can usually reproduce it:
Create a Google Meet session and connect with two devices (laptop and android in my case, video is enabled on both).
Wait for 20-40-60 minutes until WiFi hangs (no traffic moving anymore, no ability to connect to the access point).
Interestingly on the new firmware WiFi is not degrading slowly but stops working suddenly. Connecting through LAN and restarting WiFi from LuCI makes it work again. As I mentioned above disabling WMM helps to avoid the issue however this also makes the WiFi network a lot slower.
Any thoughts? How to debug? Is it hardware / driver / hostapd issue or something else?
This issue is still happening regularly and I’m not sure what to do with that.
If it’s software issue - I’d report on openwrt and wait for updates. If it’s hardware issue - I’d buy another router. How to debug and know who’s fault it is?
Another issue is that I cannot find a way to detect this on the router itself. If the issue was detectable I’d configure a monitoring job to reboot it automatically.
Switching to the latest snapshot version of openwrt based on ath9 fixed the issue with Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is fast and stable now! This could be the end of story however WAN link turned out to be unstable this time. ETH1 interface keeps up and down frequently.