4 ms·

What is good cheap consumer gear for putting OpenWRT on? Similar to WRT54G was, back in the day.

bogwog 6y ago
T-mobile sold a bunch of rebranded asus routers a couple of years back that are still excellent today and can be had for pretty cheap. Comes with some shitty tmobile spyware I think, but you can flash openwrt on it. Speed tests are pretty unreliable, but the peak unobstructed wifi speeds I've gotten from that have been better than what I get from my Unifi 6 lite, which supports wifi 6, even on wifi 6 devices. (couple hundred mbps on a home gigabit plan from Nazi Germany I mean Comcast) EDIT: it's called the T-Mobile AC-1900
- mrslave 6y ago
  Thanks for the tip. This is a rebranded Asus RT-AC68U and in the $200 sweet spot. Unfortunately it's a Broadcom-based device which means OpenWRT support is limited, but apparently DD-WRT has better support[0]: > DD-WRT has a license agreement and NDA in place with Broadcom that allow usage of better, proprietary, closed source wireless drivers (binary blobs) which they are not allowed to redistribute freely. [0] https://openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-ac68u https://openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-ac68u
bmurphy1976 6y ago
I have a TP-Link Archer C7, a Linksys WRT3200ACM, and a Netgear R7800. I've used all 3 as my primary device on my network running OpenWRT. I bought the TP-Link first. It worked, but it's an underpowered device and it was struggling to keep up with all the devices on my network. It also has a MIPS chip so it couldn't some ARM only software I wanted to use. I replaced it with the Linksys. I had nothing but problems with it. It was fast and reliable using the Linksys firmware (but functionality was severely limited). When running OpenWRT it was a buggy disaster. One example problem, it would randomly start dropping bonjour packets for no explicable reason thus preventing my wife from being able to print from her iPhone. It had to go. I was about ready to give up on my OpenWRT dream, but I took one last chance and bought the Netgear for cheap off of eBay. It's great. It's fast, it's reliable, and so far it just works (been running it for a year now). So the C7 is good if your needs are limited, but I really do recommend the R7800. It's a very nice device and you can probably find it for cheap on eBay like I did.

T-mobile sold a bunch of rebranded asus routers a couple of years back that are still excellent today and can be had for pretty cheap. Comes with some shitty tmobile spyware I think, but you can flash openwrt on it. Speed tests are pretty unreliable, but the peak unobstructed wifi speeds I've gotten from that have been better than what I get from my Unifi 6 lite, which supports wifi 6, even on wifi 6 devices. (couple hundred mbps on a home gigabit plan from Nazi Germany I mean Comcast) EDIT: it's called the T-Mobile AC-1900

mrslave 6y ago
Thanks for the tip. This is a rebranded Asus RT-AC68U and in the $200 sweet spot. Unfortunately it's a Broadcom-based device which means OpenWRT support is limited, but apparently DD-WRT has better support[0]: > DD-WRT has a license agreement and NDA in place with Broadcom that allow usage of better, proprietary, closed source wireless drivers (binary blobs) which they are not allowed to redistribute freely. [0] https://openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-ac68u https://openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-ac68u

bmurphy1976 6y ago

I have a TP-Link Archer C7, a Linksys WRT3200ACM, and a Netgear R7800. I've used all 3 as my primary device on my network running OpenWRT. I bought the TP-Link first. It worked, but it's an underpowered device and it was struggling to keep up with all the devices on my network. It also has a MIPS chip so it couldn't some ARM only software I wanted to use. I replaced it with the Linksys. I had nothing but problems with it. It was fast and reliable using the Linksys firmware (but functionality was severely limited). When running OpenWRT it was a buggy disaster. One example problem, it would randomly start dropping bonjour packets for no explicable reason thus preventing my wife from being able to print from her iPhone. It had to go. I was about ready to give up on my OpenWRT dream, but I took one last chance and bought the Netgear for cheap off of eBay. It's great. It's fast, it's reliable, and so far it just works (been running it for a year now). So the C7 is good if your needs are limited, but I really do recommend the R7800. It's a very nice device and you can probably find it for cheap on eBay like I did.