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I imagine that wi-fi long ago reached a standard of sufficient stability for the vast majority of home users, cafés and restaurants, etc. When I look at the rou

I imagine that wi-fi long ago reached a standard of sufficient stability for the vast majority of home users, cafés and restaurants, etc. When I look at the router at friends’ houses or hanging on the wall at businesses, it is often a decade old, and no one complains about drops or having to reboot. (In apartment blocks people may sense that their wi-fi is a bit slow, but merely changing the channel away from the default will often make a big difference.) The many older-generation routers that have reliable and advanced OpenWRT support are perfectly fine for most non-corporate use-cases.

trustingtrust 3y ago
"it is often a decade old" This is a problem first in terms of security and secondly why ISPs have their own hardware cause people will upgrade their plan and complain they are not getting the speeds because they don't even have the hardware to support it. Firmware bugs in routers are becoming common for DDoS attacks.
cavisne 3y ago
One subtle benefit of cutting edge routers, a lot of routers nowadays are WiFI mesh routers. This traditionally was not very good, but at least at the moment a mesh between routers over WiFi 6E (which most devices do not support) works really well.
hinkley 3y ago
Shit I’m still using an Apple base station. I kept expecting them to come back. OpenWRT was okay but it is just a pain in the ass to figure out what model works with what version. Too many vendors have been compatible for only certain hardware revisions and I just don’t use enough Wi-Fi for it to be worth the effort. I have Ethernet again after a long time of not having it.
marttt 3y ago
Yep. Our family still makes do with a WRT 54GS v5. A carefully configured DD-WRT installation (man, I did a ton of reading for that :) and memory expanded to 16 MB. Works fairly well, even for single-person Zoom calls and our son's gaming in Minecraft servers (+ Discord blabbering). As for DD-WRT, my favorite setting is the timer for turning wifi off for the night, and a scheduled restart each morning. I also set the signal strength to as low as I could. This way, the router has been running with no issues whatsoever, maintaining a very stable download rate -- so it sure does make sense to dig in the DD-WRT (or OpenWRT) documentation and wikis. I admit being somewhat attached to old-but-excellent hardware in general, though, so there's that.

trustingtrust 3y ago

"it is often a decade old" This is a problem first in terms of security and secondly why ISPs have their own hardware cause people will upgrade their plan and complain they are not getting the speeds because they don't even have the hardware to support it. Firmware bugs in routers are becoming common for DDoS attacks.

cavisne 3y ago

One subtle benefit of cutting edge routers, a lot of routers nowadays are WiFI mesh routers. This traditionally was not very good, but at least at the moment a mesh between routers over WiFi 6E (which most devices do not support) works really well.

hinkley 3y ago

Shit I’m still using an Apple base station. I kept expecting them to come back. OpenWRT was okay but it is just a pain in the ass to figure out what model works with what version. Too many vendors have been compatible for only certain hardware revisions and I just don’t use enough Wi-Fi for it to be worth the effort. I have Ethernet again after a long time of not having it.

marttt 3y ago

Yep. Our family still makes do with a WRT 54GS v5. A carefully configured DD-WRT installation (man, I did a ton of reading for that :) and memory expanded to 16 MB. Works fairly well, even for single-person Zoom calls and our son's gaming in Minecraft servers (+ Discord blabbering). As for DD-WRT, my favorite setting is the timer for turning wifi off for the night, and a scheduled restart each morning. I also set the signal strength to as low as I could. This way, the router has been running with no issues whatsoever, maintaining a very stable download rate -- so it sure does make sense to dig in the DD-WRT (or OpenWRT) documentation and wikis. I admit being somewhat attached to old-but-excellent hardware in general, though, so there's that.