I’ve had a TP-Link Archer C7 v2 router for quite a while. I can’t remember exactly why or when I got it but I suspect it was to tinker with OpenWRT 🙂

At some point in time I was having some weird WiFi problems, specifically on the 5GHz bands. Bandwidth would tank to the point of becoming unusable even for video streaming, and I couldn’t figure out why. I ended up shelving it, but I chose to keep it since the OpenWRT support was great (modulo this) since it might come in handy later. I guess that later is now 🙂

I wanted to embark on a little routing adventure (post coming soon!) so I decided to dust off the good old Archer and updated it to the latest OpenWRT which was recently released. I remembered the 5GHz WiFi problem so I decided to search the web and see if there was any new solution to my old problem. Unconstrained by the need to get it working or by mere luck, I found an issue on GitHub which described my problem to the letter! This comment was right on the money.

Apparently OpenWRT changed the firmware driver used for the chip in this particular driver from the original ath10k to a fork called ath10k-ct which was going to be better maintained. Not sure what happened there, but it seems like ath10k is a better one for this router so the way forward here is to go ahead and use `ath10k`. The following commands are better run over a wired connection to make sure you don’t lose connectivity after we uninstall and reinstall WiFi firmware.

# First remove the old firmware
opkg remove kmod-ath10k-ct ath10k-firmware-qca988x-ct

# Update the package list
opkg update

# Install the non -ct version of the firmware
opkg install kmod-ath10k ath10k-firmware-qca988x

# Reboot
reboot

After the router comes back up the 5GHz WiFi should be stable again! Now back to tinkering…