Meshpoint has been using OpenWRT as firmware from beginning thanks to open source nature of OpenWRT.

Unfortunately development on OpenWRT has been slowed for over a year and since then a lot has changed. So we needed newer solution that was open source and will provide us with improvements. We found that in LEDE Project, an open source fork of OpenWRT that is developing rapidly and offer a number of improvements over OpenWRT.

Some of the changes are:

• Move from Linux kernel 3.18 to much newer and stable kernel 4.4.61
• Many drivers are updated and more stable
• Packages are updated and offer more features
• Lot of security issues have been fixed

Biggest improvement and main reason for move to LEDE Project was introduction of Airtime fairness feature.
In a typical conference room style environment someone could be using a old laptop with 802.11g standard while rest of the crowd is on newer 802.11n standard laptops or tablets.

By the laws of Physics, slow devices take relatively longer times to transmit and receive data compared to faster and newer devices. This gives less time to faster devices and disproportionately longer times to slow transmitting devices. Similar behaviors in air time can be observed if a device is farther away from an access point relative to other clients or if many client are connected to the same access point.

That way newer and faster devices get lower speeds. This behavior is not present in home networks due to small distances and small number of connected devices.

To solve that and enable faster device to achieve higher speeds we use Airtime Fairness.

Airtime Fairness gives equal amounts of time they can transmit or receive data to each client regardless of its theoretical data rate. This will ensure higher download speeds to faster devices and also makes sure that when larger number of clients is connected one cannot use all of the bandwidth.