As long as you can do without 802.11ac, make sure you get something supported by the ath9k driver, which IIRC is the only driver that doesn't need a firmware bl

As long as you can do without 802.11ac, make sure you get something supported by the ath9k driver, which IIRC is the only driver that doesn't need a firmware blob. So all the people working on bufferbloat etc. are using that driver for their tests, so you'll get the improvements first. I have a TP-Link TL-WDR3600 v1 running OpenWRT. It was cheap, and works fine.