Consumer grade WiFi gear - when fixing the root cause is not at reach

Some time ago, I had to improve the performance and coverage of my home network, so as to be able to use the several devices around the house flawlessly, regardless of the location. Some of these devices have a certain demand for consistent bandwidth, as is the case of the SmartTV for watching IPTV and Netflix, and others such as the smartphones and tablets.

As always I tend to be frugal with spending money in hardware, trying to go with what performs well and is just about enough for the job.

This led me to aim for WiFi gear that would both be somewhat popular and low cost, while at the same time having some hope of being hackable and reflashed to OpenWRT in the future. This was the reasoning when I decided to buy a couple of TP-LINK TL-WR841N routers (with v9 hardware at the time).

At first I set these up and played with the stock firmware, configuring one to play the roles of  NAT, DHCP, DNS, firewall and so on, and the other to act solely as a WDS repeater, allowing WiFi coverage to be extended to the rest of the house.