WiFi Hotspot number of clients limited

Troubleshooting
1

Hello everyone. I have this issue that sometimes some devices could not connect to the Wifi Hotspot installed on my Raspberry Pi 3B+. The issue was rare and a reboot of the Rasp would solve the issue. Now that there are more devices, this issue happens a lot more frequently and after some digging around it seems it’s a hardware/driver/firmware limitation. A lot of people complain about this limitation, having a lot of different numbers. For my case, my limit is 7 devices connected simultaneous, which is low. I don’t expect the Rasp to handle as many clients as a “normal” router but at least 12 would be enough for my case.
According to this and this the solution is either using an external USB WiFi dongle (I tried one and surprisingly is also limited to 7 clients) or using a different Broadcom firmware.
I would like to see if the community already encountered this problem and how it was fixed before messing around with firmware changes. Ty.

Information

G_DIETPI_VERSION_CORE=8
G_DIETPI_VERSION_SUB=23
G_DIETPI_VERSION_RC=3
G_GITBRANCH=‘master’
G_GITOWNER=‘MichaIng’
G_LIVE_PATCH_STATUS[0]=‘applied’
G_LIVE_PATCH_STATUS[1]=‘applied’
Distro = bookworm
Linux NetBox 6.1.21-v8+ #1642 SMP PREEMPT Mon Apr 3 17:24:16 BST 2023 aarch64 GNU/Linux

Steps to reproduce

  1. Install Wifi Hotspot
  2. Try to connect a lot of devices.

Expected behaviour

  • More than 7 devices connected simultaneous.

Actual behaviour

  • Only 7 can connect. The 8th device gets “connection failed” when trying to connect.

Extra details

A good power adapter in use already.

2

As far as I know, you are the first person to encounter this problem in this forum.

3

I went and tried the firmware change from the normal one to the minimal one following the instructions here.
Since the minimal firmware is already present In the system files, in my case, for the Raspberry PI 3B+, all I had to do is:

cd /usr/lib/firmware/brcm/
sudo ln -sf …/cypress/cyfmac43455-sdio-minimal.bin brcmfmac43455-sdio.raspberrypi,3-model-b-plus.bin
reboot

I can confirm that the limit of 7 devices is gone. I successfully connected 11 devices simultaneous. I don’t know what’s the new limit but I’ll assume that it’s 19 like the github doc says.