TL;DR: I did a thing with fiber and surprise surprise, it’s better than wireless.

In my last post I was really excited about buying a second router, setting up WDS, and moving some server gear to a better spot in my apartment. I had considered it a win that I didn’t have to mess with ethernet cabling. Well that didn’t last long.

I’ve now replaced the WDS-based network setup with a dedicated fiber run. It started as an effort to address intermittent network issues, but ended up improving nearly every aspect of my home network, from transfer speeds and Wi-Fi performance to overall responsiveness.

The Problem with WDS

My previous network configuration relied on Wireless Distribution System (WDS) to bridge parts of my network. It was great under normal conditions, but dropped off during heavy usage. Large data transfers would cause servers sitting behind the WDS connection to become unresponsive.

I’m working with LLMs on my Strix Halo machine. I’m experimenting with several models (Qwen 3.6 35B, Qwen 3.8 27B, and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next) on different inference engines (llama.cpp, Halogen, and Gufo). These models are relatively large (anywhere from 14-110GB), and moving model data around the network generates substantial traffic.

During these transfers, the network would become unresponsive. Even my Mosh sessions to servers behind the WDS connection would disconnect, sometimes for as long as 12 seconds. It was pretty clear that the wireless bridge was a reliability problem.

It’s totally possible my network problems are due to the specific hardware I’m running (2 * Flint 2 M6000 wifi routers) or bugs in the OpenWRT firmware (I did at least confirm the latest firmware was installed, though), or that I’m in an apartment where there are just a TON of other wireless networks setup and potentially conflicting with my setup.

Moving to Fiber

Rather than continuing to troubleshoot the wireless bridge, I decided to eliminate it from the network’s backhaul entirely.

I picked up some more hardware:

• Another “dumb” network switch
• SFP+ fiber optic transceivers
• some fiber optic cable

For surprisingly few bucks, I was able to replace the WDS connection with a dedicated fiber run between the “dumy” switches.

One nice advantage of fiber is its physical size. Compared to traditional Ethernet cabling, fiber is considerably thinner and easier to route and hide. I was able to run the cable out of the way and keep the installation relatively unobtrusive. This was my first time working with fiber, and it was far easier to run and setup than I anticipated.

Giving Wi-Fi Its Own Job

Now that the WDS link was gone, I had a spare Wi-Fi router to put to work. I set it up as a dedicated access point in the living room, where most of our devices are used, and disabled Wi-Fi on the main router to reduce overhead. (The theory here being that a cooler router is a higher performing router.)

Because the fiber line handles the backhaul, the access point only has to worry about serving Wi-Fi.

The Results

The improvements have been noticeable across the board:

• Wi-Fi performance improved significantly. Simply relocating the access point to the living room resulted in much faster wireless speeds.
• Data transfer speeds nearly doubled. Separating the wireless access point from the network backhaul has made a substantial difference in throughput. Sure, I expected an obvious performance improvement from replacing wireless connectivity with dedicated fiber. But doubling speeds was very unexpected and very cool.
• The main router runs cooler. Removing the Wi-Fi access point responsibilities from the main router resulted in noticeably lower operating temps.
• The network is considerably more responsive. The network just feels snappier and connections to servers are, once again, reliable. My Mosh sessions remain connected and servers on the backhaul run are no longer intermittently disappearing while large volumes of data are on the move.

Final Thoughts

This was one of those projects where the benefits extended well beyond the original problem. By separating routing, wireless access, and the network backhaul into more distinct responsibilities, the setup is faster and far more reliable now.

I wish I had just set out to run the fiber in the first place. This has absolutely been worth the effort to revisit though.