Someone reported switching WPA2 only to WPA/WPA2 security on the parent AP miraculously fixed the Media Bridge performance. Not recommended from Wi-Fi security stand point, but you can test if this is the case with your setup as well. There are some firmware quirks with this router.
Transfer speed slower on media bridge vs wifi only
Hello, I have an ax86u as the main router running merlin firmware latest version. I have a laptop with an AX card internally, and also connected by gigabit Ethernet to an ac66b1 in media bridge mode. (running latest stock firmware) When I transfer a file from laptop to another computer on the...www.snbforums.com
Tested this theory. Slow downs experienced when AP SSID set to wpa2/wpa3-personal as below.
For WPA-personal, there's also options for wpa/wpa2-psk, wpa-psk, wpa2-psk. Dropping it down to wpa2-psk fixed the speed issue with more current firmwares (386 branch). However, in performance testing, the older firmware had a marginal increase of ~100 mbps more in iperf3 results, reaching speeds of nearly 900mbps on a 1300 mbps link. Perhaps there's more code bloat in the newer versions.
Either way, for my purposes of media bridge mode, any security or bug fixes are relatively irrelevant. The RT box itself has no internet access, gateway and dns ip's are undefined (or set to bogus values if undefined not allowed). Only wifi related security fixes would be of value. It would of been nice to fully saturate the gig link, but I'll take 800-900 mbps on this decade old device.
Btw, thanks for the link. Sounds a lot like my headache. This AP (eap670) allows for different security settings for each defined SSID. It's thus possible to have 2 distinct ssid's, on the same vlan, on the same band (5ghz) with _different_ security parameters. Seems clunky to me, but a possible usecase might be to allow a client using older security standards to communicate over wifi to client supporting newer standards. Very edge case IMO. If anything, I'd put the older (less secure) client on their own ssid/vlan entirely, even block lan access (guest mode blocks all traffic bound for private ip ranges).
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