Least mW Necessary for Wi-Fi

To cover all corners of my 2 bedroom apartment, it seems as if 10 mW is as low as I can go, using my cheapo Linksys router running dd-wrt (which defaults to 70 mW).

Interestingly, once I dropped down below 10 mW, I could not get a DHCP lease from a laptop, even if I were a few inches away from the router.

(According to the dd-wrt FAQ’s “wireless questions” part, 84 mW is around the limit before you start to distort the packets [I have yet to see proof of this, though]).