They are working on an OpenWRT Two at the moment which will be Wifi 7.
OpenWRT runs on a lot of hardware and its a great way to extend the life of a router past the manufacturers patches as well as gain a lot of capabilities. I wouldn't buy a commercial router that wasn't supported by OpenWRT now.
Why do they always have to look like some unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider? What happened to a plain unassuming looking piece of industrial hardware...
Wifi 5-7 happened, now operating at 3 different frequency ranges (2.4, 5 and 6Ghz) and using techniques like beam forming and MIMO. All those antennas need to go somewhere.
If you want plain unassuming looking hardware get dedicated wifi access points and place them all over the building. There are plenty of those shaped liked big smoke detectors.
If you want single device there are also quite a few trash can shaped home routers.
Don't buy one which looks like that if visuals are important for you. I already told that there are plenty of models which avoids this design and form factor. Do I have to spell out specific manufacturers and models?
Almost none of the Ubiquity stuff looks like that. Xiaomi has plenty of white/gray cylinders or boxes with rounded corners. TP-link has whole Deco series, Asus has ZenWifi series. Majority of MikroTik non rack mounted hardware also targets more neutral design.
You also have to consider who is the target audience for dedicated all in one wifi routers.
Majority of regular people are fine with the WiFi that's builtin the modem provided by their ISP.
Any serious commercial office will have the IT team to setup separate (rack mounted) router/switches and ceiling mounted access points that look like previously mentioned smoke alarms.
People with large enough house to need multiple access points but aren't IT specialists willing to wire up Ethernet everywhere -> various product lines described as mesh routers. Like the trash can shaped TP link Deco series and similar from other manufacturers. If your house is not that big, nothing stops you to buy one of them and ignore the mesh functionality.
That leaves people living in small enough house/apartment to be served by single router/switch/Wifi access point combo but for some reason not being satisfied what the ISP provides and also wanting multiple wired connections. Exclude the IT specialists willing to set up home lab and you are left with gamers (potentially impressed by black spider) and few others who have hopefully have enough rationality to place the router where it's not an eyesore or picking some of the previously mentioned stuff.
Another factor is move from antennas that are simple correctly size wire maybe with some spiral which easily fits in small rounded antenna to flat pcb antennas which encourage more rectangular design of the antenna housing and rest of the router. A lot of it is still partially just for the show, trying to give the impression "this one has more/bigger antennas must be better WiFi", but oversized partially empty plastic antenna housing were a thing even before current spider trend.
White slightly rounded 8 legged spider still looks like spider. Trash cans have a bunch of antennas but they hide them in larger volume. Dedicated access points have the advantage of being placed more predictably (near ceiling with little obstacles), they also have advantage of being distributed less work for each of them instead of single router covering whole house.
You don't have to buy such a design, the ubiquiti u7 lite and u7 pro are ordinary round white ceiling mount 802.11be AP.
Somehow ordinary non tech consumers got it into their heads that something which looks like a f117 with many spiky antennas sticking out of it must be faster.
The U7 Lite only does 2x2 MIMO. Compared to 4x4 MIMO in the U6 LR, the U7 Lite therefore does a much poorer job at beamforming (directing the energy of the signal towards the device).
Personally, I find it better to have multiple low end access points (like the TP-Link Archer C80 which has 3x3 MIMO on 5 GHz) deployed to achieve excellent coverage in a house. Sadly, the U7 line is a bit too expensive for that. Plus, I'm loathe to deal with UniFi deployments now that I am well versed in the glass jaws in the platform.
There really is space in the market for a product line that is basically what UniFi is, but done "right". Ie: can be debugged or you can fix it without an internet connection or recover the system when the owner forgets the password and lost access to the email account used for 2FA. UniFi is an absolute nightmare the moment anything goes even slightly wrong.
I went from Unifi to Ruckus APs and never looked back.
You can find older generations on eBay very inexpensively for what they are, install Ruckus Unleashed firmware on them, and operate them completely locally.
They have the best beamforming antennas in the industry and their firmware is rock solid. I'm on some very old models (2.4ghz and 5ghz only) but they work fantastically well. I'll probably upgrade to some wifi 6 models soon.
But for my uses 500-600mbps rock solid throughout my house is plenty. Anything where I want max throughput/low latency/low jitter (mainly gaming) is hardwired. For wifi I care much more about complete and consistent coverage.
Yes, perhaps they do allow for greater flexibility, but that's complex and difficult to do well/reliably, and doing it well/reliably requires signal analysis gear and software modeling that's out of the reach of normal consumers.
Because the gamers and dads who make all the purchasing decisions about household routers love F-117s, and stealth bombers, and consider fighter jets and black “Nighthawk” branding to be way sexier than a pink box of candy.
A shit ton of beam forming and phased arrays. Why do you think all of a sudden there's a bunch of "WiFi Radar Imaging" projects popping up on HN? It's not just because of advances in ML. Boost the output power by a few more magnitudes and you can probably ship them to Ukraine.
I am not sure why a simple cylinder shape should be called "trash can shape". It can be favorably compared to many things. How about an R2D2-shaped router?
I bought it in anticipation of the Nintendo DS having WiFi capabilities, which I had never heard of before (I was like 13 or 14 then). Had to convince my parents to get broadband internet too.
Still have one, still works. Would happily use it if it were still practical. I think you can still load OpenWRT on them, but there's no software route around the hardware being outdated and slow.
Not a recent version, not from the last 10 years at least. They dropped even 8/32MB devices. On my Turris Omnia, the bare system with nothing else running takes about 70MB RAM, mostly because of kernel size. Linux itself isn't as light as it used to be.
The best you can do is put DD-WRT on it. AFAIK, they still use kernel v2.6 on devices this old.
As a counter opinion to "too slow" in regards to 54Mbps, as it likely depends on your use cases. My WRT54GL was the primary family router until 2018 and even worked just fine for live video broadcasting. Even today it sees good use for video calls with no issues at all. Lovely little piece of hardware that refuses to die. Just a shame that OpenWRT has dropped support since 2013, which feels a bit ironic given their name.
I was so annoyed that the Linksys cable modem, that came in the exact same color scheme was not stackable with the routers. You had a wifi router and a non wifi router in the same exact case with same exact front panel. But no, the modem was completely different form factor.
I have been extremely happy with cisco 3802 access points purchased on ebay for $25 each. Sure, it's only wifi5, but they're pretty solid and you can just deploy a swarm of them.
And they don't look fugly.
It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.
TBH if I wanted a bunch of closed source 802.11ac (2017 era) AP purchased on eBay, I would go for Unifi stuff far before Cisco. There's a plethora of it available from decommissioned sites.
I didn't look at those; do they support running some controller thing in one of the APs to allow central management of all the nodes?
Cisco's mobility express just runs on one of the APs and can fail over to another of the APs; it's a slick piece of software.
And yes, it isn't open source, which is a real shame since cisco's killed it (as far as I can tell) and it probably represents an enormous and sophisticated investment in effort and engineering and it'll just melt into entropy.
I loath cisco and don't recommend their kit lightly. In this one case, they seem to have accidentally made (for my use case, running 5 APs at home) a perfect product. They're cheap, extremely reliable, my wife doesn't hate them (though mostly they're in the attic or basement; only one is visible), they've got a (relatively) easy to use UI that manages all of them at once, and (Except for the switch 2) they seem to just work even though I've got vlans and lots of SSIDs and other goofy stuff).
If I had a simpler house to support, I'd just get a single WRT capable "big fast" router / AP...
Thanks for the head's up! The Rukus Unleashed looks like the perfect replacement for my icky system.
I'll put in an ebay search notification for when the R650 (and R750) for $50 each and maybe it'll ding in a couple years and I'll be in a place to swap out the 3802 network I've got running now...
I don't know if the one you're talking about is one of these, but in the many years I worked at Cisco they seemed to buy a company every few weeks. Many of them had decent products which Cisco then meticulously destroyed. Luckily there was always kit to preserve for future generations, which I dutifully stacked in my attic.
I'm overall not a fan of Cisco; quite the opposite. There are lots of companies ahead of Cisco in the "pretty not so cool" these days so my ire is not as strong as it was when I was a young idealist.
As far as I can tell, in this one case (with mobility express) it seems like Cisco accidentally did something overall (IMO) "good" for the world by making it possible for their kit to be reused by some part of the world where someone will get utility out of the still very nice equipment and somehow cisco won't see a dime from that "someone is using cisco equipment" event.
Mobility express isn't perfect, but considering the cost of the gear and the cost of the license, it is pretty darned good. I suspect some product manager at cisco got fired for accidentally making the world not quite as bad a place as it could be if cisco extracted license fees on all the 2802, 3802, and 4800 access points or otherwise sent them to the e-waste bin 4 years early.
Unfortunately you need to use the cisco software / firmware. The access points run linux but they're locked down like crazy with signed firmware blobs and such.
That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and all this equipment and software is now totally unsupported by cisco so don't run PCI transactions at home... I'd also avoid running their captive portal or some of their other weird features...
Actually setting it up is a bit of a chore but it is a full featured "enterprise" (cough) AP management system with all the knobs and twiddles you could ask for.
It's really only a good idea if you don't value your time (like me) or if you have a sprawling plaster house where you want to have lots of cheap access points instead of a couple super fast ones.
Lastly, for better or worse, I haven't been able to make my kid's switch 2 work on the network.
Uni has an adapter for USB to Ethernet (if wired is an option) that works with those Nintendo devices, I have one that an extended family member borrowed (unknown if the Switch was a 1 or 2).
Cisco has trained a generation of home-lab would-be cisco engineers to dig through shady russian forums to download sketchball binaries. I think they even hide the checksums of their gated binaries, just to make sure you're never sure how sketchy their code might be.
But in the one specific case of mobility express, you can ... just download it. Unexpected but actually pretty cool.
You still have to figure out installing and configuring it, which is mildly tedious, and you'll probably need one of those cisco serial cables, but it is an exciting side-quest instead of a dirty forum crawl.
To bring it back to "openwrt" -- this nonsense by cisco, broadcom, HP, IBM, etc is why generation after generation the "enterprise" market is dying -- they're excluding 90% of the would-be engineers from the job market protecting their e-waste from secondary or later reuse, likely just on the off-chance they might make a tiny amount of money downstream. But I guess that's not a line-item that shows up in the quarterly reports (what's the value of "community goodwill" ?)
Because a modern wifi router requires a minimum of 6 antennas. 9 is even better.
This lends itself to a spider like design with just a ton of antennas sticking out of a box, or a trash can with the antennas hidden inside around the outside edge.
But usually it is a phased-array setup, or it seems to be, with a row of antennas.
Another setup is circular or semicircular. I suppose it allows for a more uniform directional diagram across the entire 360°, because a straight phased array has harder time emitting sideways.
It is probably a combination of hitting a (low) cost and mimo; cisco makes pretty reasonable looking APs with lots of radios and decent coverage and they look like UFOs not alien spiders.
But it's probably easier / cheaper to get maximum coverage at larger distances from a single AP using a big array of sticking out antennae, and that's what a normal home user is going to want.
I feel like there's an untapped market here. I want them to go with the alien spaceship concept all the way thru; I wanna see mini Death Star mesh nodes, X Wing routers and Millennium Falcon access points, dammit. Or hell, cross the multiverse and give me Borg Cube mesh nodes, complete with green shiny LEDs that actually indiacte network/hardware status.
Because a shocking amount of consumers buy things based purely on how they appear and the gamer adjacent aesthetic looks surprising and advanced to consumers. Unassuming business boxes are much harder to sell via the visual marketing
if your rep depends so much on visual aesthetics then I'd say you don't have much rep to begin with. if someone trusts me they'll buy whatever I say regardless of how it looks, and likewise if I trust somebody to recommend a piece of hardware I know the aesthetics are irrelevant and they know more than I do about the specs compared to the competition.
It's a pretty functional design if you accept that the extruded antennae are necessary. They're really small, like half the footprint of my old Asus 6 antenna beast, and the fixed antennae are so much less fiddly. Finally, fast and one-click adguard home, what's not to like.
Hey, I think this is important, Flint 3 relies on a Qualcomm chipset, so, at least some weeks ago, no vanilla OpenWRT was available for it (Qualcomm kernel).
On the other hand, if you can live with Wifi 6 and only 2x2.5Gbps ports (and 4x1Gbps), Flint 2 is powered with a Mediatek chipset, that runs a 100% vanilla OpenWRT.
Both are 1GB RAM, 8GB emmc little beasts that can even run some docker containers. IMHO Flint2 is in the top 5 for SOHO OpenWRT supported routers
In my opinion, get the Flint 2, the Flint 3 doesn't work with vanilla OpenWRT (but it does work with GL.iNet's OpenWrt fork). Then again, I don't need the 5x2.5G ports or Wifi 7 since my internet only goes to 1G.
I got the Flint 3 because I wanted 6E for my Quest 3. It’s not bad, but still doesn’t reach enough through the walls. What I like about GL.Inet UI is that it’s very easy to set up WireGuard /OpenVPN profiles per MAC, and you can drop into LuCi for more advanced stuff.
It's not Broadcom so it is supportable by OpenWrt. It runs Qualcomm IPQ5332 SoC which recently got supported in upstream linux ath12k drivers... There are a few patches to make it work and the only blocking issue is with the Realtek switch connected to the LAN ports.
I am not a purist on the blob situation, there is no time to chase each one... GL.Inet folks seem to be good people, the product works.
BTW, even though there are mentions that OpenVPN is accelerated on this router, WireGuard is still times faster. I had to switch from ExpressVPN to Proton as ExpressVPN doesn't support WG profiles.
I have really liked my GL.iNet travel router, also with OpenWRT. I didn't think I would need a travel router but they're pretty handy.
I didn't realise routers like theirs existed, and had been paying through the nose for your standard brands like TPLink and hoping it didn't get popped.
Glinet are doing a great job with their routers. I have the Beryl AX which is fully openwrt compatible. The new Beryl 7 is also fully compatible now. Mediatek chips might not be as high performance as Qualcomm but they make up in openness.
Edit:
They just announced Flint 4 with a Mediatek chip:
Gl.Inet ships with their openwrt version. I have the last version and it can be flashed to vanilla openwrt or one a high speed branch. It’s been good and fast. I don’t need wifi 7 yet so I have time.
I run OpenWrt on 2 of my routers. It's really amazing the level of control. Although, I am now building a better approach: a mini PC as a managed linux router replacing my ISP (no wifi). Then my 2 wifi routers for wifi.
That router uses OpenWRT, but only official firmware can be installed. The Asus ZenWifi BT7 is currently widely recommended if you want to go OpenWRT Wifi7.
Source? A cursory check on their website shows a Hong Kong and a US address. Some people seem to be claiming mainline China associations as well, which could be true, can't find anything on that in either direction.
But Israeli, no can't find that. Sure you didn't confuse it with some other company?
It looks like the person you replied to deleted their comment, but I assume it was about GL-iNet being a Chinese company.
They have a tiny Hong Kong office that handles marketing as well as a US office for technical support, but the entirety of engineering and manufacturing is in Shenzhen and Chengdu.
Because they provide a hosted site-to-site VPN service they are obligated to hold a B13 license. One of the conditions of which is the ability for the Chinese government to request access to devices worldwide.
I bought one of their travel routers to play with and even though it's OpenWRT based, I consider it Chinese firmware because they add their own stuff on top of it. The fact that it's even possible that it can be enrolled in their GoodCloud remote access....no thanks. I consider it an untrusted device except when I have stock OpenWRT on it. I know it's paranoia but companies like that marketing to the tech crowd/devs especially now with their KVM's just seems slightly fishy.
That is interesting (and I recommend you flash stock openwrt instead, I did on mine). But no, the parent comment I replied to claimed Israeli / IDF connections.
Why 7 (802.11be) when the bandwidth isn't really used? Genuine question. The GL-BE9300 mentioned here clocks in well within WiFi 5 range even.
I've got 10Gbps fiber at home (egregious, I know), and the only OpenWRT router I found that can saturate it is the Turris Omnia NG[0]. The price tag is a notch up from others but it's legitimately one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever owned. A perf3 test against an in-town server was able to pull 800 Megabytes per second; the router is no joke.
If you have a thick line to your ISP, I highly recommend!
Screw the max theoretical bandwidths for marketing, without 6 GHz (which would need 6E or 7) and the improved airtime efficiency I can barely get a few hundred jittery mbps standing next to my AP because the airspace is so crowded where I live.
>I've got 10Gbps fiber at home (egregious, I know), and the only OpenWRT router I found that can saturate it is the Turris Omnia NG[0]. The price tag is a notch up from others but it's legitimately one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever owned.
Apparently, WiFi is spotty on OPNsense. I did start looking into home grown options, but WiFi 7 with 10Gbit ethernet is no joke. Most hardware ends up being power-hungry and noisy.
The Omnia NG is fanless, meaning quiet and power-efficient. It's also small and relatively stylish. The small hardware LCD is very handy, and everything Just Works. The whole package is just so well put together.
Fanless is attractive on paper, but often means overheating and unreliable in practice. A large, slow fan in a bigger case is always better if you value reliability and a long service life. The best 10G router that you can buy is a low spec PC with a two-port 10G NIC. Make sure airflow is directed to the NIC (a PCI fan bracket is useful for that). WiFi is best handled by a dedicated access point, ideally the ceiling-mounted commercial type.
In my stress tests, I've not seen any issues with overheating. My 10G ONU connects to the router over an ethernet cable, and the SFP+ module that plugs into does get quite warm, though not hot enough to be uncomfortable.
You can run vanilla if you want. Their Turris OS is just a custom distro with some added userspace niceties. One of the coolest is a snapshot system that reduces "unbricking" the device to just a menu click at bootup.
There are even people who have gotten NixOS running on it, apparently.
OpenWrt is a great piece of software(firmware) to prevent ISPs selling your browsing data to the advertisers. Although by now most ISPs are probably doing packet inspection.
It's easy to customize, I have a script to notify me when a new device connects to my router[1] and I also have a script to notify me when someone logins into my router[2].
Earlier I used to connect my openwrt router directly to the ISP's switch but now a days they've started to force their 'AI powered' router which is centrally managed. I now have to usee OpenWrt to defend against the ISP's router first and then the broader public network.
> OpenWrt is a great piece of software(firmware) to prevent ISPs selling your browsing data to the advertisers.
Huh, how? Either ISPs are doing deep packet inspection, and can track your browsing data regardless of what firmware you run, or they don't, and it still doesn't matter what firmware you use on your switches/routers, you ISP still won't be able to see TLS traffic, which most internet traffic is today.
Until there's more wide support for Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), the SNI header in the TLS handshake is always sent in plaintext. Between that an unencrypted DNS, most routers can easily spot/log what you're accessing in a browser.
As some not deep into networking, just home(lab) stuff, learning OpenWRT took some time. But now cannot think of buying a router not for OpenWRT, once I learn what is possible I want to use it.
Fot example from my ISP I can have two options for PPPoE connection, first is legacy IPv4 only but lacks IPv6, second is IPv4 but behind CGNAT and with modern IPv6.
With OpenWRT, I am able to make two PPPoE connection over the same wire and have the best of both worlds.
Combining the WiFi with the router never made sense to me. Routers can last a long time and WiFi gets new versions with new capabilities every few years.
I would rather just connect a separate wireless AP to my switch, preferably also with PoE. And then I can upgrade and expand that as needed while leaving the perfectly fine router alone.
I just bought a house and this was the conclusion I came to. A cheap PoE-capable multigig switch and a single Omada access point cost about the same as a cheap WiFi 7-capable router would have. I did opt to run the Omada Controller software on a Raspberry Pi instead of buying a hardware controller (to save a few bucks); maybe if I had a lot more hardware it'd make sense but for my one AP it's more than capable. So far I'm quite pleased, it gives me the peace-of-mind knowing that WiFi upgrades are effectively plug-and-play - plug in the AP, adopt it in the controller, add it to the site, and the existing network is already being broadcast - no more router reconfiguration every few years!
The other devices based on the same filogic chip do have dual 2.5Gbps at least.
You can get a Wifi 7 device and 2x2.5GBps with Wifi 7 support already with the Asus BT8 and a few other devices. Asus's bootloader firmware flasher will take the initial OpenWRT image so its really quite simple to get going.
How will it handle PPPoE at gigabit speeds? I've been wanting to replace by terrible router from my ISP, but the options that can handle gigabit+ PPPoE are limited.
Very well, IIRC I have measured its capability to route at about 16gbps IIRC although that isn't PPPoE just the usual iperf test, it handles my 1.2gbps without any drama.
I've been hunting for a good switch with at least two 10Gbps ports too, surprisingly hard to find today still. I've ended up with a XGS1250-12 (3 10Gbps ports) for now, but OpenWrt support isn't great, the ports end up 1Gbps (or some other similar problem, not sure I remember the details 100%), so still running Zyxel firmware which, well, isn't OpenWrt... Other people here might have recommendations for suitable switches with good OpenWrt support?
Is there a version of the Banana Pi kit that comes with all of the dozen carefully positioned antennas desirable for a tri-band or quad-band wifi 7 setup?
Off topic, but what amuses me about the "Wrt" name is that it was originally alternate firmware for the Linksys WRT54G router from 25 years ago. The name has stuck for whatever reason; I guess since only geeks use it and know what it is.
I'm pretty sure the software side of the project is a direct descendent from the WRT54G stack.
LinkSys got sued to release the firmware as it was GPL linked. This dump got modified to make the WRT54G way more powerful than LinkSys ever planned but they got to sell the hardware for years more than would have been expected at the time.
Yeah it was so popular they even released a specific WRT54GL model (where the L stands for Linux) in order to keep supporting third-party firmware after the main hardware series moved on to a more optimized VxWorks-based OS that let them ship less RAM and Flash.
A mainstream hardware company releasing a specific product SKU to support third party firmware really sounds crazy from the perspective of the current market where a substantial portion of the value in selling hardware is supposed to come from subscriptions and surveillance.
Yeah, I loved it because it allowed me to boost the signal above FCC-approved power requirements and saturate my house with that sweet 2.4GHz connection everywhere.
It is basically always better to run more APs at lower power in the areas where you need coverage, than to boost the power. Especially today with the radio spectrum being so congested.
Despite this, I could expect 3-5 people to hunt me down at PyCon when I was running the wireless to tell me that I had misconfigured the wifi because it was set to low power. More reports of that than reports of wifi not working, IIRC. ;-)
(I was running the wireless because the people we paid do to the wifi would just set up one or two APs and crank the power)
FYI: I've never had any problems with that. Back in the mid-2000s I was running the WiFi for 1000+ people at a time at conferences for 3-4 years, and basically had no complaints.
> it was originally alternate firmware for the Linksys WRT54G router from 25 years ago
There's a couple of fun examples like that. xda-developers is named after the O2 xda, a smartphone from 25 years ago that not many people ended up developing software for.
May just take a look at it... I'm not doing much with OpnSense, I'm running RPi on a separate system, that I'd like to integrate into DNS on the router itself, but that's about it. The only other feature I want to use but haven't configured is auto failover to a cellular modem. It's cheap, and enough for work, but not great for heavy use.
I used OPNSense briefly when I got 1gig synchronous fiber ~2015 at home on an old i5 desktop, which I think was shortly after the pfSense fork, and then found Mikrotik and RouterOS. Used RouterOS at home since and have been replacing aged out Cisco switches in the datacenter (100gig) and closets (20-40gig) cheaply. I'm looking to dump a handful of ASA's for OPNSense and the messing around I've done so far has been positive. It's aged nicely.
The best model of the WRT54G line. I would snag them at thrift stores for cheap to use for silly utility functions. I always referred to that particular model as "The highly-coveted WRT54GL."
I used a pair to provide Internet access at a Customer's construction site back in 2010. Cell phone hotspot wasn't a thing for me yet. We took a pair of WRT54Gs, configured one as a WiFi client, the other as a bog-standard router/AP, connected the LAN from the client to the WAN on the router/AP, pur a directional antenna onto the "client", and pointed it down the road toward a big business who offered free WiFi for Customers. We leeched off that until the real Internet service got installed. (It was a restaurant and we ate there at least once so we were Customers, right? >smile<)
It seems crazy to me that Linksys didn't look at the success of the WRT54GL and the higher prices they commanded and decide to just keep doing that. Why every company feels the need to roll their own firmware that is buggy, slow, crashy, and doesn't implement half of the promised functionality properly is still baffling to me.
Companies roll their own, I think, because of a combination of Not Invented Here and secret-sauce binary blobs. They work within the script that the chipset/radio maker gives them to follow.
---
They don't often offer inexpensive, deliberately-hackable units like the WRT54GL, I think, because of support costs.
And by "support costs," I don't mean that it was expensive to hold users' hands while they installed custom firmware -- that's never been a service that has been provided.
Instead, I mean that there are people who start goofing with this stuff and run out of skill when hacking close-ish to the metal on this kind of hardware. They don't know how to get themselves out of a jam and unbrick their device.
So they find a way to lie their way into getting an RMA and get the device replaced under warranty, and that's expensive for companies to deal with.
It's disappointing that we still have terrible "press 9 buttons at the same time while reciting from the Necronomicon and plugging in and out the device" recovery stories.
Put the firmware and config on a ** uSD card, or set up some sort of UF2 recovery mode. Then no matter how badly you bollix it up, the answer is "plug it into your computer, download the big prominent "factory image", and drag it onto the device.
If done right, you could even do stuff like "clone the SD card so you can deploy identically-configured units for every branch of your chain business."
Well we still use Roman months and weekdays, and carry over the 30/31 days months even though we could’ve had a way better system by now (base 10 and equal divisions)
I just received my OpenWrt One because I’m tired of dealing with the questionable quality of most routers.
And I don’t feel like resurrecting my old PC that I used as a router for a while. I stopped doing that because it’s loud. Pretty sure the power supply fan is about to fly off.
But Qualcomm WiFi pci card with giant antenna in a dirt cheap PC running ancient Ubuntu and a simple hostapd setup is so far the most reliable WiFi router I’ve ever had. I hope openwrt one is even better :-)
In case it is not, an old PC with a dual port Intel NIC running OPNSense is so far the best router I have ever used. I mean rock solid performance with near zero maintenance beyond adjusting VLANs and setting up a 6in4 tunnel over the past 5 years solid. My home network is larger, more diverse, and more complex than what I suspect most people have, with several hundred devices and yet I log into the OPNSense UI maybe twice a year and usually just out of curiosity.
The learning curve is a little steeper than more consumer stuff but it is by no means beyond a person who is capable of using OpenWRT and the docs and forum support are better than 99.9% of open source projects I have seen over the past 25 years.
Hi I tried with OPNSense, but I use a screen reader they made a big song and dance about fixing 11y on there web interface. In the end they did fuck all. OpenWRT has bin good with a screen reader since the start and the few times I have pointed out things to be fixed they have bin fixed with in days. So yeah go OpenWRT.
That is a very solid argument against OPNSense! I do wonder if the advent of AI can be used to fix issues like this, but in the meantime I totally see why you would choose OpenWRT.
I don't disagree, however using an old PC as a router almost certainly wastes an enormous among of power. An old non-gaming PC could use 70kWh of power a month if running continuously (as a router would), which is around 11 a month and almost 140 a year. At that price you could just buy a nice router, or an OpenWrt One which will possibly also have newer, faster WiFi standards (WiFi 6)
For some real numbers, I picked up a 2018 generic office PC (Core i5-7500) used for $50 as a backup machine to run linux on when my laptop was in for repairs, and it idles at 14 W, vs the OpenWrt One which appears to run at 5.5 W.
So that's 10 kWh/mo for the PC vs 4 kWh/mo for the OpenWrt One.
Yep, and that's anywhere from about $1.30 to $3 something in the really expensive states for electric rates in the US. Half that if you only count the delta between that and a low power device.
Spending hundreds on new hw to save $20 a year in power cost.
I currently use an old boring HP tower. Nothing fancy, I think it’s a quad core AMD APU. But if building it from scratch I would get a $35 thin client off eBay and stick a NIC in it. The CPU load is minimal as the network card does all the processing. I do have 8 TP-Link access points and a hardware controller as well as three unmanaged PoE switches for the Wi-Fi but that would be the case regardless of what my router is.
>however using an old PC as a router almost certainly wastes an enormous among of power
I don't think you're quite right on this, or at least you're imagining using something inappropriate when the comparison here involves buying something new right? So it's not "OpenWrt One" vs "whatever you happen to have in your closet" but "OpenWrt One (~$110-130)" vs "whatever can be bought used for $110-130, if you have nothing appropriate". And while they won't go to near-zero like some ARM stuff might, idle power for PCs improved a ton after around the 2013 era. There are lots and lots of small systems available for equivalent prices on Ebay or the like made since then (like Intel NUCs or various other mini PCs) that will idle around 4-10W. Like to take something in the same price range as this OpenWrt One, I regularly see 7th gen era NUCs going for <$140. An i5-7260U will have single threaded performance about the same as the MediaTek in this unit and multi-thread close, but will also generally have 8-16 GB of RAM and often a 250-500GB NVMe drive as well. It'll probably have only one native ethernet, but USB or TB adapters work fine with Linux & FreeBSD at this point.
There's definitely a question of values and exactly what you're trying to focus on, but there are a lot of niceties in having lots of RAM on tap and extremely standard fallbacks to interface with a system, back it up, etc.
>or an OpenWrt One which will possibly also have newer, faster WiFi standards (WiFi 6)
If you want an AIO style device that's definitely a consideration, though again USB WiFi dongles are a thing too. But regardless of router choice, for someone considering going beyond what their ISP offers at all I think it's usually well worth spending the $50-80 to get a dedicated wireless access point. It'll make a major difference in real world performance in most spaces I've seen to just physically have a unit in an ideal spot (on a ceiling or high up on a wall, away from metal). Aesthetically the clean disks or rectangles those tend to have also blend well and mean that various boxes can be tucked away. And of course you get to upgrade networking bits separately from your router.
Anyway, definitely good there are multiple approaches, this is an area of life where people can have very different needs driven by very different physical environments and "stakeholders" (like significant others). But I think OPNsense (or other bog-standard-PC FOSS alternatives like VyOS) can be competitive even in TCO, depending on how much value you place on pushing your networking stack and what else you have going on (like solar power).
>I just received my OpenWrt One because I’m tired of dealing with the questionable quality of most routers.
My latest 3 home routers have been mikrotik, mikrotik and juniper.
And the Juniper is still in there, just running as a switch. The old juniper srx sucks at uPNP but is otherwise still a fantastic router if I wanted to swap back to it.
Middle tier mikrotik took a power surge and lost 50% of its ports. It still routed just enough for me to get a replacement.
"Enterprise class" wifi routers from ten years ago sell on eBay for about 1/5th as much, and work just as well for most home or small business applications.
It's worth being careful here: a lot of the affordable enterprise-class routers from 10+ years ago aren't as fast as cheap consumer hardware - like the OP or just a decent mini PC. The primary arguments for the enterprise-class gear are around feature availability and certain aspects of reliability (redundant power/fans, better heat tolerance, higher quality components). It's also worth remembering that this kind of gear tends to be built for dedicated environments: loud fans, higher power draw/lack of power saving features, etc.
Beside the potential performance and environmental issues the other big downsides tend to include firmware availability - either because download from the site requires a login on the vendor's site or, increasingly commonly, the gear has hit LDOS and images just aren't posted. Obviously there are other "unofficial" places for such images, but the risk/legality are a whole other (potentially serious) question.
There's an additional issue mapping the requirements of home networking to enterprise gear: Ethernet switches are lousy firewalls (little or no NAT, primitive built-in security, DLNA/mDNS and friends aren't really sane options, etc). Finally, even at "1/5" the price the gear may still be quite a bit more expensive than other options. And if it's not expensive, it's usually because nobody wants it any more because of the issues mentioned above (being near- or beyond- LDOS).
FWIW this is from someone who literally built a commercial-class machine room in his house with dedicated AC, subpanels, commercial UPS, etc for data center class Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Infiniband switching as well as carrier-grade routers and still runs "enterprise" grade WLAN and switching and can lay hands on as much as I could reasonably want without too much drama or cost... Going down this road can absolutely be amazing if you either have a.) the background to properly source and run the hardware/software or b.) have a driving desire to learn how to do so or c.) have some very atypical requirements for home networking. Otherwise it tends to not be something to be done lightly.
Aren't they also missing security patches? I'm not sure about you, but I'd rather have SOHO routers with up to date firmware, than enterprise routers with out of date firmware.
How about OPNSense on open hardware of your choice, and passing messy wireless to separate AP?
OpenWRT is very good, but the installation and upgrades are not easy. There is a zoo of images for different hardware, installation options and tools. It has to run on small devices, so there are limitations. The documentation on Wiki is scattered and could be improved.
I had to search forums for weeks for a custom package installation for my router. Right now I have been trying to upgrade to the latest version via LUCI for a while, and it stucks. Probably have to wait for few weeks, go through CLI and maybe search forums again.
I just thought I am paying a hefty time price for a bit more expensive x86 mini pc and AP.
With the 25.12 release, the luci app to use ASU for upgrades became installed by default in OpenWrt's "vanilla" images the project builds and provides for supported hardware and devices.
Previous OpenWrt releases at least as far back as 21.02 could be equipped with the same degree of ASU support by installing a single package (luci-app-attendedsysupgrade) and its dependencies.
All of that is a nope. The solution is that a router should have a standard unattended upgrade system built into it that is on by default and pulls from the stable release stream, preserves your configuration automatically with a 100% guarantee of it working, automatically falls back to the last known working image if the update fails, and has a way to notify you of what’s going on with it. This must work out of the box with the first install without you having to do anything at all or even be aware of it except perhaps setting the time of day and day of week/month when the router is allowed to reboot itself for the upgrades (but the default should be set automatically by the system). Anything less than that is simply broken for anything that is considered production quality. Words like “image builder” and “config baked into the image” are for those developing the system, not end users.
> The solution is that a router should have a standard unattended upgrade system built into it that is on by default...
Mmm, no. Unexpected downtime for infrastructure is godawful... just ask Windows Home users.
OpenWRT has a "Click a button to upgrade" thing, just like just about every consumer/prosumer-grade equipment does. [0] It also has a command-line tool that one can use to automate upgrades, for environments where the phrase "production grade" is actually an important thing to think about. [1]
[2] Those documents mention that you need to install some things to get operator-initiated upgrades. As of March, the button to click is installed by default, and the CLI tool is installed on systems that have enough disk space for it. [3]
Maybe so. The documentation seems to be all over the map, and the GUI suggests using "attended sysupgrade" for upgrades.
...which I tried doing, a week or so ago, for a minor point release update within the 25.12.x series. And then the router went out to lunch and didn't come back.
Getting it going again wasn't so bad as such things go. My router has a huge advantage here in that it's a Raspberry Pi 4, so it's easy to remove/replace/re-do the flash device and start over.
(Except: I get all out of sorts when I need to do Internet stuff to fix my Internet connection while that Internet connection is absent.)
Yeah, for non-X86 devices, getting to U-boot with pressing a combination of PINs in particular order and conditions and releasing at right time is a pain.
I think I wasted $100,000 in salary for $100 more in device cost, in setting up an OpenWRT router.
Apart from installation and upgrades, the OS itself is nice, very flexible and capable.
I've got other options for routing hardware and software (of course I do), but I generally keeping using OpenWRT. Looking back, it seems like I've had it around in some form or other in active use for about 20 years so far.
Part of what keeps it around is the flexibility and the home-network-centric hack-value. I mean, this whole thing grew out of a shell injection exploit on a Linksys WRT54G. :)
Anyway, it can keep whatever counts as a slow WAN connection today feeling responsive and quick with cake SQM, even while loaded heavy with traffic and users. It's nice in that way, even though enterprise types don't seem to be interested in that kind of thing at all.
I could take a nice Juniper router home from work to use instead and it would absolutely trounce the packet-forwarding performance of my cheap OpenWRT box...while also doing nothing at all to make my home-gamer WAN limitations more tolerable.
So OpenWRT is still my answer, with the warts and upgrade woes and all.
> OpenWRT is very good, but the installation and upgrades are not easy.
Agreed that separate router and dumb AP is the way. Every time I updated OpenWRT there was some gotcha that created an unexpected headache where I had to rebuild my elaborate configuration from scratch.
I'm not convinced A -> G upgrade paths are tested, only A -> B -> ... -> F -> G but who manually updates with that level of discipline?
You're right, it's interesting that this device isn't the most technically superior in hardware or software, and isn't the most casual user friendly. It seems to be targeting a segment I can't bucket other than loyalists. Maybe good hardware & software for the cost?
> How about OPNSense on open hardware of your choice
Yes, it's a possibility, but if you want to tinker, I think a plain Linux distro like Debian is better. Turning it into a router is literally a couple of kernel parameters and a few iptables rules to set up NAT. Nowadays that's less than fives minutes of work with Claude.
This buys you much better performance and hardware compatibility relative to a BSD system, as well as lower resource usage and attack surface (no GUI or other unnecessary additions). WiFi support on BSD is bad, but on Linux you can use hostapd and almost immediately get an access point for free. And of course Linux is also better if you intend to run other stuff on the same hardware.
But what if you don't want to tinker? I switched to OPNsense as a direct replacement for our Asus "WiFi routers", and it has been phenomenal, reliable, and does everything needed - when you just want it to work, it really just does. But when you want more advanced functions, there are tons of plugins and stuff that you can run natively, while still having a true CLI.
I suppose it comes down to what you said - "if you intend to run other stuff on the same hardware." Is it a good idea to run all sorts of extra stuff on your literal firewall/router? And if you did, I'd assume using a hypervisor is safer anyway? That way you can have the GUI and reliability of OPNsense but have a Linux distro beside it.
You also said that Linux has much better performance vs BSD, which seems rather far fetched. Got any data for that?
One other thing: OPNsense comes with a ton of helpful rules to eliminate bot traffic, allow IPv6, different NATs, VLANS, etc which you'd have to add manually. Not the end of the world, but worth considering.
> Is it a good idea to run all sorts of extra stuff on your literal firewall/router?
I don't see any reason not to. I run dozens on services, both bare metal and containerized (Podman) on my router/firewall. It doubles as an all-purpose home server with plenty of headroom to spare. It's just a computer that sits at the edge of my network, and running services meant to be exposed to the Internet on it is natural.
> You also said that Linux has much better performance vs BSD, which seems rather far fetched. Got any data for that?
I should have worded this more carefully. What tends to happen is that BSD has worse (or no) drivers, that's when BSD's performance can noticeably degrade vs. Linux. From memory, people online were reporting issues with Realtek chips. With Intel NICs, the routing performance should be broadly equivalent .
Ah, I see. Well, that does make more sense now. I guess just have a surplus of mini PCs so for me it makes more sense to run one routing box and one server box, but I know how much use cases vary.
I agree about Intel vs Realtek to some extent. My Lenovo M73 OPNsense actually has a 2.5G Realtek mPCIe NIC on the LAN side and it has actually been pretty great and reliable so far! Transmit maxes out early at 2.28Gbps-ish but receive is 2.47Gbps (Jumbo). However, the other week it glitched out and reported UP but was actually unresponsive. I'm still looking for an mPCI Intel i226-V version of the same thing...
The only downside to your solution is that most people (me included) would rather have auto generated configs so that you don't accidentally expose everything to Internet or break everything with an iptables rule, but that's down to experience I'm sure.
Anecdotal, but I was never able to get FreeBSD (TrueNAS CORE, OpnSense) to get anywhere near 10 Gbps. Using Mellanox or Intel NICs. The Linux equivalents (TrueNAS SCALE, OpenWrt) handled it fine on the same hardware.
Thats more or less what I did, and nix just made sense for the job. For 99% of people I'd say no its not worth it to tinker, just go with opnsense virtualized so you get at least some the benefits of the better linux drivers. By that I mean NBASE-T on various intel chips and while intel's igb is fairly solid on unixes many other vendors' drivers are less so.
However if you're willing to figure out configuring per your needs you definitely can get a lower latency router with all the same capabilities and more, with it's components more sanely isolated via containers.
I agree on the upgrade story, though supposedly the recent move to apk will help in that regard.
I moved from pfSense to OpenWRT due to the really poor IPv6 support in pfSense. I don't use the AP capability either. How are things in OPNSense these days?
Particular pain points from pfSense was that it published global IP as DNS address to LAN clients and no way around it, so connectivity broke every time prefix changed, and no real support for specifying prefix-less firewall rules or similar, so couldn't really expose anything via IPv6 without pain.
Without performing any work at all to optimize RAM usage: My all-singing, all-dancing OpenWRT router projects have always used less than 100MB of RAM. These days, they usually occupy less than 64MB.
1GB is a ton of RAM for this kind of application. :) What do you anticipate needing more for?
But pihole asks for a pi with 512gb ram. Add openwrt’s 100mb, now your ram budget for running something else (file server, pairdrop, irc, tailscale, etc) is <400mb. One nodejs app could use all of that.
pihole is based on glibc, uses GNU utils and being based in Debian probably it's not compiled to optimize space.
OpenWRT is based on musl, uses busybox, it is space contrained and size matters.
Motorbike analogy, it's like comparing a RS125 with a Tmax/Burgman maxiscooter...
I'm old, "Unused RAM is wasted RAM" goes against my philosophy. Back in my days, a professor said in class: you want your OS as light as possible, so the more free resources you have, the faster Quake will run (by the time, Quake was software rendered). Saving resources for a rainy day today is better than saying "umbrellas are too expensive" tomorrow.
Right. I often do a lot of things with openwrt, too. They've just all happened to fit within ~100MB, historically.
And even then, I try to keep it vaguely "minimal." I don't offload as much as I can; I try to keep the router-box focused mostly on router-duties. This is because I don't want to have too many dependencies within the router: I'm really not looking to create trouble with the single-point-of-failure device that connects everything I have to the rest of the world.
This is in large part for very practical reasons. If I manage to completely stuff up the router somehow, which isn't particularly unlikely, then I really need to be able to put it back together quickly (so I'm back online quickly) without worrying about a pile of non-routing things.
If I were to put as much stuff as possible into openwrt (as I certainly can; it is just a Linux box after all), then I think I'd quickly find that it'd be better to spin up OpenWRT in a VM on a Real Computer than to keep trying to shoehorn new roles into deliberately-limited hardware.
But maybe that's just me. I got over the idea of running weird stuff on tiny hardware for the lulz nearly 20 years ago, when I was playing with a new WD MyBook World Edition 1TB networked hard drive (which was a Linux box with a shell and a package manager and a whole terabyte of local storage, even though the the sum of the parts was slow AF).
It was fun for a bit to push that limited hardware in interesting ways, and I probably did even run an IRC client on it at some point, but I'm over it. :)
I have been using them for years and I'm really happy. I recently bought the WiFi 6 upgrade kit for both of my turris. They "recently" released their latest version which is expensive but comes with WiFi 7 and 2.5 Gbps RJ45 and 10 Gbps SPF.
The Turis Omnia runs a derivative of OpenWrt. They provide a custom UI with an option to switch to LuCI. It's easy to flash it to upstream OpenWRT, which is what I do.
I have and love my OpenWrt One for my main router. I have two, so that I have a backup one I can switch to if the first one ever dies. It is the best device to run OpenWrt on as it is fully supported hardware that has great images/packages for it. Routing speeds/buffer/latency are great, everything just works, price is very reasonable.
I don't use it for my APs, but that is mostly because I already had 3 TP-Link routers setup as dumb APs using OpenWrt that have been working great. If I did it again, I'd buy OpenWrt Ones though. Although Deco mesh kits I've used have worked exceptionally well, and have become my recommendation for friends/family that don't want to do things like run arbitrary packages on their router/APs.
If you just want a good WiFi router or access point, unless you need something cannot do (e.g. WiFi 7 or 10 Gbit/s Ethernet), and if want to spend minimal time messing around with routers today and in the future, just get this one.
After getting this, I see no reason to ever buy any closed-source router again.
No need to learn/remember any other Router config either. It's just all OpenWRT, always looks the same, always works the same. Setting up a new one takes me 2 minutes max.
The recent OpenWRT update also brought the one feature the project was most sorely missing: A simple "Download and install latest firmware" button in the device UI.
Now they just need to add an unattended-upgrades option and I never have to log in again after initial setup.
another happy user here too. having openwrt with all features working and no tinkering out of the box (since it's their reference target) is a dream. this, plus the warm fuzzies of buying open-source, makes it worth it to me even with the 1GBps limitation and outdated WiFi (i use a separate AP anyway, like you). i swapped my ports in software to have 1GB WAN and 2.5GB LAN (which also lets me power the router with PoE, which i have coming in on the LAN port).
Didn't they position it as a "development board" that happens to be a router?
Personally I find vanilla Sinovoip (aka "BananaPi") products to be more interesting. OpenWRT One adds strange connectors but for some reason removes R2/3/4's cellular-focused PCIe-but-actually-USB slot, M.2 slot, and leaves just one LAN port.
I've recently been test driving SPR[1] which is a security-oriented distro for Wi-Fi routers. The team behind it are serious about Wi-Fi security and have a research lab[2] that has been credited with several CVEs in the likes of Apple's network stack. The headline feature is strong device isolation for semi-trusted guest and home automation devices, and the software stack is based around containerized and audited Go daemons.
It ran pretty well for me as a travel router I cobbled together from a Raspberry Pi and Netgear A7500 USB dongle for a stay in a short-term rental where the infrastructure network was shared with other units. More recently I have been trialing their CM5-based model with Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5GbE PoE for use as primary home Wi-Fi.
I switched from a Google Wifi to this and found it to be just as stable, but with better range/signal strength, and easier to apply the parental controls I want.
I do it the opposite way, disable my kids' devices at night, but I suspect your desired method would also be supported using native features. I have found LLMs to be very helpful in providing the right settings.
There is a plugin marketplace that provides more features, like ad-blocking. I haven't played with those yet, so I cannot vouch for them.
I use opnsense with an aliexpress n100 router. It works very well and I enjoy it. But upgrades scare the crap out of me. I've only had 1 upgrade where things went bad. I have zfs snapshots and everything, but just because its a headless unit, I get super anxiety upgrading the system waiting for the beeps for it to come back online.
I virtualize mine with proxmox and pass the necessary NICs through to the VM. Snapshots make rollbacks a breeze. You can also run HA pairs if you want to do updates without downtime.
As someone who knows very little about WiFi, I always thought it sucked that if you wanted to go from 802.11this to 802.11that, it always requires brand new hardware with a different WiFi chip that implemented the new standard. Is there a good reason that software-defined 802.11 doesn't exist and that every new standard requires a different radio+SoC?
One example is the introduction of MIMO, a technique to send multiple data streams in the same frequency band in parallel. This requires multiple antennas, i.e. hardware which wasn't there in the previous wifi version. Note this was 2009.
A 5 port 2.5GbE switch would upgrade this to 5 total ports (4x 2.5GbE), and costs less than $100. If you only need 1GbE then it's even cheaper.
Outside of home-labs, it's rare for me to see any devices connected to the LAN side of a wireless router these days, and more than 1 (i.e. the non-portable device that is closest to the router) is exceedingly rare.
Neither my parents nor my wife's parents have their desktop connected to their router. The cable modem isn't even in the same room as the desktop.
[edit]
If it matters, my mom no longer has a desktop (she uses a docked laptop now), but it is true of the docking station and was true of her previous desktop.
Chaining a switch off the gateway is the best way to do it anyway. If you do that, then when you reboot your gateway, your lan devices do not lose their physical link and can continue talking to each other.
Ok, so your wan is 1gig, and your lan 2.5...handy but not much of a perk. Lets just call this an AP, which would clear up many issues people seem to have with it
It'd be handy for me: The fastest WAN pipe I can get is less than a gigabit while my LAN is still gigabit. I can't be the only person with this situation, wherein: If anything, then the 2.5-gig port is overkill.
I don't have any direct interest in the wifi radio that the box includes (I already have Mikrotik APs that I like just fine), except to configure it as a failover station-mode interface to use with a phone hotspot when the DOCSIS connection is on the fritz.
...which doesn't happen often at all, but it's annoying when it does happen. It's nice to be able to work around problems like that with OpenWRT.
Or 1 gig is underkill. My original reply was just pointing out that simply adding a 2.5g switch doesn't make it a 5 port 2.5g router, it makes it a 1 gig router with 2.5 internal, at best
It is indeed a strange choice to include only two interfaces, and then make each of them different speeds.
Realistically, the wireless side is unlikely to saturate a 1-gig pipe. If the 2.5g is used for WAN because the WAN can use that extra speed, then it's very likely that the LAN port becomes saturated. The configuration never really fits.
The best use I can come up with is this: A 2.5-gig managed switch and PoE with a tiny bit of VLAN magic does allow the OpenWrt One to be an access point+router that can be located in a spot that is good for RF propagation, with only 1 wire connected to it for both power and data. In this configuration, it route packets with up to ~1.25g of WAN (or perhaps more, if WAN is asymmetric).
But even though VLANs are fun and I wish more people knew how to use them effectively, that's so corner case that I'd never rationally expect anybody to actually use it that way. :) And it forces WAN traffic to contend with local WLAN traffic for that shared pipe, which introduces fun new ways for networks to slow down.
That's enough connectivity for a gigabit WAN pipe and a LAN full of stuff (including one or more better/faster APs), if a person wants to slice it up that way.
It does raise the question that if it is for developers, what exactly is being developed? Especially if its not representative of hardware that is available or desired; is there some advantage targeting a very particular chipset? This seems to be the only device using it (from what i could find briefly)
I have one of these and love it, especially after I once bricked it during a manual software update and got to use the dip switch reset to reflash it using the ROM.
I wish it had more ethernet ports but I've managed to live with that. I'd be up for buying an OpenWrt Two as a backup or to replace this if it has even one more LAN jack.
There is definitely beauty in having a separate router device that chugs on just fine regardless what happens to the rest of your network. But I got bored with the constantly-churning embedded culture, bespoke OS's (sorry, OpenWRT), and VPNs generally want more CPU than what purpose-built "routers" have. So I just went back to the old way of using a plain Linux machine as the gateway (now virtualized, with NixOS and nftables) and couldn't be happier. WiFi AP is done by that same physical machine (not virtualized) and by two other amd64 machines that double as Kodi boxes. When you learn netfilter/iproute2, that experience carries to anything else you might switch to.
Does it have hardware PPPoE offloading? Because it's a huge issue for those of us stuck with old-school telecoms for our fibre connections. Doing PPPoE at gigabit speeds needs something that can handle it.
Have you looked at the BPI-R4? It's a pricier option than the OpenWRT One, but it has excellent hw acceleration for networking tasks. I am 90% sure I recall someone reporting using it for a 2.5Gbps PPPoE connection and it handled it. It's also supported by the OpenMPTCProuter project if you need network aggregation support.
While they're okay on paper, they managed to burn a lot of customers in regards to the add-on wifi 7 module.
Quite a few of the modules went out without their eeprom programmed correctly, and all of them appear to be plagued by quite mediocre performance from (alleged) inadequate RF shielding on the card.
It looks like they've revised the design, but it's peeved off quite a few of the Banana Pi/Sinovoip customers who have bought them with the intention of using it as a router/ap with their R4. (It's dual-PCIe fingers with unique spacing and requires out of spec PCIe voltages, so it's only practically usable with a BPi R4.)
At the very least, the customers using them as wired-only routers are likely to be having a slightly better experience.
OpenWRT is amazing. Other than the usual security stuff one of the most overlooked use cases was scheduling other devices. Router is always on and with eatherwake it can orchestrate turning on other networked devices. I also run rtl sdr to capture local weather reports.
OpenWRT is used as base for a surprising amount of edge devices.
I'd love to see more OpenWRT hardware that was capable of 2x2.5, 2x5 or 2x10gbit without any wifi, preferably in a case that can be rackmounted without too much trouble (so keeping it under 1U height). I'm currently running a stack of Zyxel T5600's, which are quite capable arm64 openwrt boxes. Those in a rackmount but with sodimm support or in 8+GB ram versions (and some sata/nvme storage, USB3) would be amazing.
I have similar board, from same producer - BananaPi BPI-R3 Mini.
Got cheaper version without case - designed simple box with cutouts and 3d printed it out.
I can say it works flawlessly. I'm very happy about it. Previously I was using openwrt on different consumer-grade routers and I always had some issues, even when selecting supported devices.
I'd like something bigger than 1gb for the LAN port...yeah, most of my stuff is quick from a wifi standpoint, but I don't want the hardwired stuff to be second class citizens.
I became interested in OpenWrt when I noticed that the cloud portal for my ISP reported to me the names and types of devices that were associated to my home access point/router.
Suddenly I want to put every IPS device into dumb bridge mode, and run my own damn router.
I have a Cisco MR18 router that bridges my LAN to my remote NAS. It would have become e-waste if not for OpenWrt.
When I was visiting my mom a few years back in my hometown, I converted her cheap plastic Xiaomi Mi router into an ordinary router using the OpenWRTInvasion exploit. That router then bridged a remote SIP phone to the main LAN, which was connected to the internet through another plastic router that had also been turned into an ordinary router, again thanks to OpenWrt.
That project is fantastic, and the people behind it are doing great work. Can't recommend them highly enough.
Bpi does a nice job on open source hardware and openwrt integration, but only 2 ports in this model is really good?
Just update my bpi-r3 purchased years ago from 24.x to 25.12, it need a bit of extra work because the sfp interface is renamed(though I never used that), and i finally just do plain sysupgrade only and add some required packages because i run a customized fd.io vpp build on the bpi-r3, connected via vhost-net backed tuntap, it works well, I never regret bought this machine, with current agent stuffs, i think bpi r3 model may be more fun to play with
Been using Openwrt for years, router and access points. Any new AP I buy has to has to be supported by Openwrt. I have probably bought 7 or 8 old AP's at yard sales over the years for $5/$10 and turned them into decent wifi access points back to an Openwrt router running vlans, bandwidth monitoring, QoS, tcpdump for ssh dump with wireshark.
Just excellent, some pretty smart people in the Openwrt forum as well if you have problems.
I started down my “custom” home network journey with OpenWrt and some aftermarket hardware routers. Enjoyed my time using / playing with it.
After some time though, I eventually moved over to using OpenBSD directly. My small brain has a much better understanding of all the moving parts compared to that of OpenWrt :P
It costs about a fifth as much as I just found out.
Turris also specifies 'based on' OpenWRT, rather than straight OpenWRT. In reality there may not be much of a difference, until if/when Turris no longer exists.
the single 2.5gb port kills me. you may as well just have 2 gigabit ports at that point. and don't tell me the wifi is the selling point either, you won't get much more than a gig off 6e.
is there any decent management software for a whole network of these yet? That's what keeps me going back to unifi with opnsense as the router. Last I checked it was basically openwisp, which was hugely painful/complicated to get working when I last looked a few years ago. I would love nothing more than to have a viable option to start replacing the unifi stuff (even better if there is also 10gb switching but that feels like an absolute pipedream still without a large budget for datacenter gear)
I’ve been running one for a while and love it. Have also built a Nix -> OpenWRT config language transpiler so that I can keep my router state in Nix files and have nice deterministic rollbacks etc. It’s been great!
I'd be interested in any more info you can provide. Do you have your router configs in flakes? I'm currently testing Nix in a proxmox VM.
I just finished writing a shell script to dump all the UCI config files to one text file using curly braces to bracket/separate each file with the intent of committing this to a repo. Then will be writing a little parser to chunk up the text file to the appropriate /etc/config structure that OpenWRT expects. So at any point I can then just checkout different git branches, run the parser, and bam the entire config has been written to the router over ssh.
Still trying to figure out if OpenWRT has some other state outside of the /etc/config directory.
i don't understand the use case for 1x2.5gbs + 1x1gbs for a router. Why not both 2.5gbs it's not like you'll be running lots of stuff on the router itself so it would be more useful to have a wan AND a lan at 2.5 (outside of load balancing for a lot of wifi devices of course)
I once tried to flash OpenWRT onto a very old router that was EOL, and apparently wherever I had downloaded the firmware it was pre-pwned. There was literally an interface numbered “eth666” and the CLI was playing crazy mind games with me as I tried to configure it.
So I thoroughly destroyed the router and e-wasted it. I honestly never want an open-source router OS ever again.
What I want is a cheap, brainless wifi 6 or 7 device, that's easy to mesh and extend. I currently have Orbis that are Wifi-5, and I'm sick of the general untrustworthiness. The thing is, like my WRT54G from back in the day, they just work in all situations. It's amazing how stable this kit has been for 7 years.
I'm not in the US. I can't Amazon. I don't want to spend the equivalent of 1k USD just to get 3 devices in a brainless mesh that covers my ~125sqm place made of insane amounts of radio blocking concrete.
I no longer want to maintain my network, to have network. I want things that just work. The Orbi did that for me - but the costing makes me think abut the future, and not finding a painless solution. I guess that's the tradeoff.
To wit, I also want the mesh comms on another channel (i.e 6Ghz, rather then the 2.4/5.0) and the computers/IOTs/etc isolated from that. Perhaps cheap tri-band is insanely wishful thinking. It sure seems that way.
An open hardware network-focused ASIC would be cool, but cost and long development times would likely be limiting factors. If you wanted to explore this further, starting with FPGA-based router components would be a good starting point. For example:
Thanks :)
Yeah, the router is defiantly further in the future to, as it additionally requires CPU integration for run the software stack, switches are the first order of business.
I too use ASUS RT-AX53U. Decent hardware. But stock firmware was terribly slow. IPv6 didn't even work.
I heard OpenWrt when I searched how to fix the stock firmware. Flashed it and never turned back. Now, OpenWrt is a critical infra in my house for adblocking, DoH, Firewall, Network Segmentation etc. None of these are possible with the stock firmware.
I'm sorry but lack of 802.11be tri band is a non starter in mid 2026 for this price. Someone else commenting in this thread has linked the glinet 802.11be unit which looks like a better option.
I would also highly encourage people to buy a wired only router, and something like a ubiquiti u7 lite or u7 pro AP, and separate the functions of router and AP.
The ubiquiti unifi controller package is really straightforward to install for basic SOHO use on a base Debian stable system.
My home setup is pretty much as per your description, but for someone like my parents, this does it all in a single device that uses far less power.
I've recently been setting up a GL.iNet Marble for my folks, with Adguard and some other filtering / security add-ons. This is a bit more expensive, but also more future proof.
> Note that recent (2025-10) batches of the OpenWrt One have an M.2 slot with a detached post at the 2230 position and the shipped product contains no way to attach the post.
The implications of this are going over my head (and TFA should explain it better). I gather that 2230 is a form factor 22x30mm and there's also a 2280 M.2 SSD form factor.
Is this just saying that there's a missing mounting post? So it wobbles? You can't use a certain form factor?
This is wrong. OpenWRT is fostering several manufacturers that are using OpenWRT as the factory platform for their products. This is a reference design (one of several, this particular one from 2024 is now dated and newer designs are available,) provided by OpenWRT, and they've thoughtfully made it available to anyone that might want one: you can just go buy some with no NDA bullshit and get your developers moving in your lab or doing UI development or whatever. The not-cost-optimized PCB is what you want for this, in addition to the ample RAM+Flash. The "useless" POE is another aspect of this: access points use POE ubiquitously, which is a key OpenWRT use case.
This sources PoE using a third-party daughter board which is mechanically way too big to package into any production access point. So no, that part of a reference design would never be used.
> get your developers moving in your lab or doing UI development or whatever
This is what the industry has been clamoring for among a sea of existing hardware: More garbage UIs glued atop of copy-pasted forgotten hardware.
I am an engineering manager. My job is to poke holes in money-burning projects.
Strange. A good engineering manager would see that "way too big" PoE daughter board design as exactly what one would want in a reference design that will be used to test and integrate your preferred PoE solution. Power product life cycles are so short and availability problems so frequent that a good engineering manager knows that their engineers will be reworking power solutions with some regularity.
A good engineering manager would also know that UI development for commercial products is not optional. The engineering manager will expect that marketing will want branding at the very least, that differentiating features will need to be surfaced, etc., and that all of this will need to be integrated into build, test and the package system, and QA'd on real hardware. Basic stuff for an engineering manager.
There are no cheap commodity routers that can run OpenWrt, have modern Wi-Fi features, and are reasonably available (in the sense that you could buy one if your router fails).
OpenWrt is vastly superior to the proprietary software in commodity routers. Proprietary software gates software features behind more expensive models, even though the cheap hardware can handle them.
You also get software updates. Your hardware doesn't become a paperweight when the manufacturer refuses to fix a known, actively exploited vulnerability.
You'll get new features, for free.
> You're not attaching this monstrosity to the ceiling.
I would hide it, but whatever.
The enclosure is open source as well. You can build/print your own enclosure if you'd prefer, or get any enclosure for the Banana Pi BPI-R4.
They can't just ship a board without an enclosure, because it won't pass certifications.
For a around two years there, the dynalink dl-wrx36 was selling between $50 & $85 for comparable/better hardware. Still running a pair with an nss-enabled fork. Still effortlessly maxes out a gigabit fiber line with qosify.
Configured it so the 2.5gbe port connects towards the lan where a cheap wifi 7 AP can broadcast the additional signal if anything feel like it needs it. But practically speaking nothing does.
While the openwrt one was a decent experiment, it was far from the only hardware in the price range that had stellar openwrt support before/after it came out. And one thing people seem to forget about with a lot of options (like banana pi options) is that the range & falloff can be terrible. The openwrt two is apparently delayed & going with a different manufacturer.
Openwrt is great if you are willing to customize the software especially. The fact that it can be used as an actual wifi client in a pinch is also a lifesaver.
Long-long term availability is a different problem, but different manufacturers move on.
> Long-long term availability is a different problem, but different manufacturers move on.
Open hardware solves this. You've been able to buy the OpenWrt One from China and ship it anywhere in the world for a reasonable price, every single day since it was released, even when there were better options available. If no one's selling, there are factories willing to make very tiny batches.
But you can already do that with existing hardware that is 4x capable at the same price point, and runs OpenWRT.
A reference platform makes no sense for OpenWRT as by its nature it runs on dozens upon dozens of different hardware, all which are different and must be tested independently.
It will take time to build up to a point where it's competitive on paper, it's insane that you're comparing a first-gen product from a rag-tag crew to the hardware produced by behemoths that have thousands of engineers and billions of dollars to play with.
Where my use cases don't permit it I won't use this, but if it fits I would rather buy an open-hardware device at ~10x the price of an equivalent proprietary device not out of charity but because that is how much more value it provides to me at equivalent hardware performance.
We'll have to make our own hardware. The value of open-source hardware is not limited to repairability. We want the entire digital communication hardware + software stack to be transparent and fully reproducible. These open-source efforts will eventually include the ASIC designs, and designs for the fab production line that makes the ASICs.
> Inexplicably can be powered via PoE, makes no sense if its purpose is to hang off your ISP's gateway
No, this is supposed to replace the ISP-provided junk entirely. It will save you money and close a nasty backdoor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069).
I think the purpose is to have a simple to hack on reference platform for developers. The problem with commodity hardware is the super short lifecycles (many of them stop selling before theres an OpenWRT port), they are locked down and the manufacturers will frequently make tons of internal revisions.
A desktop computer does not source PoE power. Do you even understand what PoE is or how it works? It's a false statement and a pattern commonly found in LLM slop answers.
That's such an assumption of needs. For someone to be using a 10g capable NAT would be some sort of super nerd with such a small portion of the population. More and more households have no compute device other than their devices. With WiFi routers now being sold with OpenWRT installed, it no longer means you're in the nerd category for installing it.
It's not obsolete, it's basically the contemporary baseline. Remember, this is a cheap device. And unlike most Chinese garbage, you can be reasonably certain that it isn't backdoored.
They are working on an OpenWRT Two at the moment which will be Wifi 7.
OpenWRT runs on a lot of hardware and its a great way to extend the life of a router past the manufacturers patches as well as gain a lot of capabilities. I wouldn't buy a commercial router that wasn't supported by OpenWRT now.
The planned specs are here, they say it will be made by GL.iNet:
https://openwrt.org/voting/2025-02-12-openwrt-two
Otherwise this router from GL.iNet has OpenWRT preinstalled, Wifi 7, 5x2.5G:
http://www.gl-inet.com/en-gb/products/gl-be9300
Why do they always have to look like some unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider? What happened to a plain unassuming looking piece of industrial hardware...
Wifi 5-7 happened, now operating at 3 different frequency ranges (2.4, 5 and 6Ghz) and using techniques like beam forming and MIMO. All those antennas need to go somewhere.
If you want plain unassuming looking hardware get dedicated wifi access points and place them all over the building. There are plenty of those shaped liked big smoke detectors.
If you want single device there are also quite a few trash can shaped home routers.
Why does Wifi 5-7 require designing the case so it is shaped like an F-117 fighter jet instead of a box of candy?
Don't buy one which looks like that if visuals are important for you. I already told that there are plenty of models which avoids this design and form factor. Do I have to spell out specific manufacturers and models?
Almost none of the Ubiquity stuff looks like that. Xiaomi has plenty of white/gray cylinders or boxes with rounded corners. TP-link has whole Deco series, Asus has ZenWifi series. Majority of MikroTik non rack mounted hardware also targets more neutral design.
You also have to consider who is the target audience for dedicated all in one wifi routers. Majority of regular people are fine with the WiFi that's builtin the modem provided by their ISP. Any serious commercial office will have the IT team to setup separate (rack mounted) router/switches and ceiling mounted access points that look like previously mentioned smoke alarms. People with large enough house to need multiple access points but aren't IT specialists willing to wire up Ethernet everywhere -> various product lines described as mesh routers. Like the trash can shaped TP link Deco series and similar from other manufacturers. If your house is not that big, nothing stops you to buy one of them and ignore the mesh functionality. That leaves people living in small enough house/apartment to be served by single router/switch/Wifi access point combo but for some reason not being satisfied what the ISP provides and also wanting multiple wired connections. Exclude the IT specialists willing to set up home lab and you are left with gamers (potentially impressed by black spider) and few others who have hopefully have enough rationality to place the router where it's not an eyesore or picking some of the previously mentioned stuff.
Another factor is move from antennas that are simple correctly size wire maybe with some spiral which easily fits in small rounded antenna to flat pcb antennas which encourage more rectangular design of the antenna housing and rest of the router. A lot of it is still partially just for the show, trying to give the impression "this one has more/bigger antennas must be better WiFi", but oversized partially empty plastic antenna housing were a thing even before current spider trend.
White slightly rounded 8 legged spider still looks like spider. Trash cans have a bunch of antennas but they hide them in larger volume. Dedicated access points have the advantage of being placed more predictably (near ceiling with little obstacles), they also have advantage of being distributed less work for each of them instead of single router covering whole house.
You don't have to buy such a design, the ubiquiti u7 lite and u7 pro are ordinary round white ceiling mount 802.11be AP.
Somehow ordinary non tech consumers got it into their heads that something which looks like a f117 with many spiky antennas sticking out of it must be faster.
I could be crazy, but don't all the external antennas allow for more flexibility with regard to directionality of signal?
I have a U7 Lite and it is very directional compared to other routers I have used (spider style, trash can style, etc.)
The U7 Lite only does 2x2 MIMO. Compared to 4x4 MIMO in the U6 LR, the U7 Lite therefore does a much poorer job at beamforming (directing the energy of the signal towards the device).
Personally, I find it better to have multiple low end access points (like the TP-Link Archer C80 which has 3x3 MIMO on 5 GHz) deployed to achieve excellent coverage in a house. Sadly, the U7 line is a bit too expensive for that. Plus, I'm loathe to deal with UniFi deployments now that I am well versed in the glass jaws in the platform.
There really is space in the market for a product line that is basically what UniFi is, but done "right". Ie: can be debugged or you can fix it without an internet connection or recover the system when the owner forgets the password and lost access to the email account used for 2FA. UniFi is an absolute nightmare the moment anything goes even slightly wrong.
I went from Unifi to Ruckus APs and never looked back.
You can find older generations on eBay very inexpensively for what they are, install Ruckus Unleashed firmware on them, and operate them completely locally.
They have the best beamforming antennas in the industry and their firmware is rock solid. I'm on some very old models (2.4ghz and 5ghz only) but they work fantastically well. I'll probably upgrade to some wifi 6 models soon.
But for my uses 500-600mbps rock solid throughout my house is plenty. Anything where I want max throughput/low latency/low jitter (mainly gaming) is hardwired. For wifi I care much more about complete and consistent coverage.
Yes, perhaps they do allow for greater flexibility, but that's complex and difficult to do well/reliably, and doing it well/reliably requires signal analysis gear and software modeling that's out of the reach of normal consumers.
Because the gamers and dads who make all the purchasing decisions about household routers love F-117s, and stealth bombers, and consider fighter jets and black “Nighthawk” branding to be way sexier than a pink box of candy.
I guess the aerodynamic design makes the Wifi faster... ;-)
Presumably you can do a snare drum shape with antennas arranged like tension rods, for whatever reason they do articulating antennas.
As for why it needs multiple antennas, it's for MIMO and beam forming.
A shit ton of beam forming and phased arrays. Why do you think all of a sudden there's a bunch of "WiFi Radar Imaging" projects popping up on HN? It's not just because of advances in ML. Boost the output power by a few more magnitudes and you can probably ship them to Ukraine.
That complaint was about its styling, not number of antennas
I am not sure why a simple cylinder shape should be called "trash can shape". It can be favorably compared to many things. How about an R2D2-shaped router?
The "trash can Mac" made this phrase permanent
The WRT54 is still one of my favorite pieces of industrial design. Small case, ~~purple~~blue and grey, two antennas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series
My first WiFi router :)
I bought it in anticipation of the Nintendo DS having WiFi capabilities, which I had never heard of before (I was like 13 or 14 then). Had to convince my parents to get broadband internet too.
Still have one, still works. Would happily use it if it were still practical. I think you can still load OpenWRT on them, but there's no software route around the hardware being outdated and slow.
> I think you can still load OpenWRT on them
Not a recent version, not from the last 10 years at least. They dropped even 8/32MB devices. On my Turris Omnia, the bare system with nothing else running takes about 70MB RAM, mostly because of kernel size. Linux itself isn't as light as it used to be.
The best you can do is put DD-WRT on it. AFAIK, they still use kernel v2.6 on devices this old.
Yeah me to. I hade a WRT54G V2.2 for ages. Loved that thing. Just toslow now tho.
As a counter opinion to "too slow" in regards to 54Mbps, as it likely depends on your use cases. My WRT54GL was the primary family router until 2018 and even worked just fine for live video broadcasting. Even today it sees good use for video calls with no issues at all. Lovely little piece of hardware that refuses to die. Just a shame that OpenWRT has dropped support since 2013, which feels a bit ironic given their name.
One could stack them.
I was so annoyed that the Linksys cable modem, that came in the exact same color scheme was not stackable with the routers. You had a wifi router and a non wifi router in the same exact case with same exact front panel. But no, the modem was completely different form factor.
I have been extremely happy with cisco 3802 access points purchased on ebay for $25 each. Sure, it's only wifi5, but they're pretty solid and you can just deploy a swarm of them.
And they don't look fugly.
It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.
TBH if I wanted a bunch of closed source 802.11ac (2017 era) AP purchased on eBay, I would go for Unifi stuff far before Cisco. There's a plethora of it available from decommissioned sites.
I didn't look at those; do they support running some controller thing in one of the APs to allow central management of all the nodes?
Cisco's mobility express just runs on one of the APs and can fail over to another of the APs; it's a slick piece of software.
And yes, it isn't open source, which is a real shame since cisco's killed it (as far as I can tell) and it probably represents an enormous and sophisticated investment in effort and engineering and it'll just melt into entropy.
I loath cisco and don't recommend their kit lightly. In this one case, they seem to have accidentally made (for my use case, running 5 APs at home) a perfect product. They're cheap, extremely reliable, my wife doesn't hate them (though mostly they're in the attic or basement; only one is visible), they've got a (relatively) easy to use UI that manages all of them at once, and (Except for the switch 2) they seem to just work even though I've got vlans and lots of SSIDs and other goofy stuff).
If I had a simpler house to support, I'd just get a single WRT capable "big fast" router / AP...
Ruckus Unleashed works the same way and plenty of them on ebay. TIL, thank you
Thanks for the head's up! The Rukus Unleashed looks like the perfect replacement for my icky system.
I'll put in an ebay search notification for when the R650 (and R750) for $50 each and maybe it'll ding in a couple years and I'll be in a place to swap out the 3802 network I've got running now...
I don't know if the one you're talking about is one of these, but in the many years I worked at Cisco they seemed to buy a company every few weeks. Many of them had decent products which Cisco then meticulously destroyed. Luckily there was always kit to preserve for future generations, which I dutifully stacked in my attic.
I'm overall not a fan of Cisco; quite the opposite. There are lots of companies ahead of Cisco in the "pretty not so cool" these days so my ire is not as strong as it was when I was a young idealist.
As far as I can tell, in this one case (with mobility express) it seems like Cisco accidentally did something overall (IMO) "good" for the world by making it possible for their kit to be reused by some part of the world where someone will get utility out of the still very nice equipment and somehow cisco won't see a dime from that "someone is using cisco equipment" event.
Mobility express isn't perfect, but considering the cost of the gear and the cost of the license, it is pretty darned good. I suspect some product manager at cisco got fired for accidentally making the world not quite as bad a place as it could be if cisco extracted license fees on all the 2802, 3802, and 4800 access points or otherwise sent them to the e-waste bin 4 years early.
Documentation for how to set these up without the cisco control platform being present is hard to come by.
You have any docs on how to set these up? I believe a firmware change is required.
Unfortunately you need to use the cisco software / firmware. The access points run linux but they're locked down like crazy with signed firmware blobs and such.
That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and all this equipment and software is now totally unsupported by cisco so don't run PCI transactions at home... I'd also avoid running their captive portal or some of their other weird features...
Actually setting it up is a bit of a chore but it is a full featured "enterprise" (cough) AP management system with all the knobs and twiddles you could ask for.
It's really only a good idea if you don't value your time (like me) or if you have a sprawling plaster house where you want to have lots of cheap access points instead of a couple super fast ones.
Lastly, for better or worse, I haven't been able to make my kid's switch 2 work on the network.
About the Nintendo Switch 2: Maybe try perusing https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/1l3vqkv/sol...
Uni has an adapter for USB to Ethernet (if wired is an option) that works with those Nintendo devices, I have one that an extended family member borrowed (unknown if the Switch was a 1 or 2).
LLMs are great at checking logs and tweaking these clis in a logged in ssh tmux pane
I don't know why I've never tried just doing it the Cisco way. Thank you for the walk-through.
Cisco has trained a generation of home-lab would-be cisco engineers to dig through shady russian forums to download sketchball binaries. I think they even hide the checksums of their gated binaries, just to make sure you're never sure how sketchy their code might be.
But in the one specific case of mobility express, you can ... just download it. Unexpected but actually pretty cool.
You still have to figure out installing and configuring it, which is mildly tedious, and you'll probably need one of those cisco serial cables, but it is an exciting side-quest instead of a dirty forum crawl.
To bring it back to "openwrt" -- this nonsense by cisco, broadcom, HP, IBM, etc is why generation after generation the "enterprise" market is dying -- they're excluding 90% of the would-be engineers from the job market protecting their e-waste from secondary or later reuse, likely just on the off-chance they might make a tiny amount of money downstream. But I guess that's not a line-item that shows up in the quarterly reports (what's the value of "community goodwill" ?)
Because a modern wifi router requires a minimum of 6 antennas. 9 is even better.
This lends itself to a spider like design with just a ton of antennas sticking out of a box, or a trash can with the antennas hidden inside around the outside edge.
Do you have other ideas for how to lay it out?
Some 3-band wifi 7 AIO routers that resemble neither spiders, nor trash cans:
https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_be3_media
https://eero.com/shop/eero-pro-7
https://www.asus.com/us/networking-iot-servers/whole-home-me...
The Mikrotik HAP have terrible coverage, and the other two are the hallmark trashcan design I mentioned.
My radio knowledge is not up to par, but couldn't a phased array antenna setup allow for friendlier form factors?
But usually it is a phased-array setup, or it seems to be, with a row of antennas.
Another setup is circular or semicircular. I suppose it allows for a more uniform directional diagram across the entire 360°, because a straight phased array has harder time emitting sideways.
The spider look comes from multiple antennas. Multiple antennas are needed for beamforming [1]; they represent a minimal phased array.
[1]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/967954/beamforming-expl...
It is probably a combination of hitting a (low) cost and mimo; cisco makes pretty reasonable looking APs with lots of radios and decent coverage and they look like UFOs not alien spiders.
But it's probably easier / cheaper to get maximum coverage at larger distances from a single AP using a big array of sticking out antennae, and that's what a normal home user is going to want.
> and they look like UFOs not alien spiders.
I feel like there's an untapped market here. I want them to go with the alien spaceship concept all the way thru; I wanna see mini Death Star mesh nodes, X Wing routers and Millennium Falcon access points, dammit. Or hell, cross the multiverse and give me Borg Cube mesh nodes, complete with green shiny LEDs that actually indiacte network/hardware status.
It is rather disturbing to me that WiFi routers already look too much like the Replicators from Stargate SG-1.
Ah, these so-called SciFi routers.
Because a shocking amount of consumers buy things based purely on how they appear and the gamer adjacent aesthetic looks surprising and advanced to consumers. Unassuming business boxes are much harder to sell via the visual marketing
I couldn't agree more. It makes it difficult to attach my reputation to when making suggestions for hardware purchases.
if your rep depends so much on visual aesthetics then I'd say you don't have much rep to begin with. if someone trusts me they'll buy whatever I say regardless of how it looks, and likewise if I trust somebody to recommend a piece of hardware I know the aesthetics are irrelevant and they know more than I do about the specs compared to the competition.
It would be great if more companies adopted standardized shapes like the 10” mini-rack format.
It's a pretty functional design if you accept that the extruded antennae are necessary. They're really small, like half the footprint of my old Asus 6 antenna beast, and the fixed antennae are so much less fiddly. Finally, fast and one-click adguard home, what's not to like.
> unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider
I love the phrasing, we usually call this design language as transformers mating.
It looks like the deceptikon logo from above thou xD
Right?
I guess they think consumers need them to look like this crap.
Because otherwise the Punx don't recognize their Cyber.
Hey, I think this is important, Flint 3 relies on a Qualcomm chipset, so, at least some weeks ago, no vanilla OpenWRT was available for it (Qualcomm kernel).
On the other hand, if you can live with Wifi 6 and only 2x2.5Gbps ports (and 4x1Gbps), Flint 2 is powered with a Mediatek chipset, that runs a 100% vanilla OpenWRT.
Both are 1GB RAM, 8GB emmc little beasts that can even run some docker containers. IMHO Flint2 is in the top 5 for SOHO OpenWRT supported routers
Latest speculation would be that they don't have a manufacturer anymore https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/1rnr0sv/what_happe...
In my opinion, get the Flint 2, the Flint 3 doesn't work with vanilla OpenWRT (but it does work with GL.iNet's OpenWrt fork). Then again, I don't need the 5x2.5G ports or Wifi 7 since my internet only goes to 1G.
I got the Flint 3 because I wanted 6E for my Quest 3. It’s not bad, but still doesn’t reach enough through the walls. What I like about GL.Inet UI is that it’s very easy to set up WireGuard /OpenVPN profiles per MAC, and you can drop into LuCi for more advanced stuff.
Doesn't the Flint 3 require a binary blob to run the broadcom chip? If so you'll always have a locked down black box inside your "open" system.
I got the Flint 2 to avoid that, and I'm really happy with it for the reasons you mentioned.
It's not Broadcom so it is supportable by OpenWrt. It runs Qualcomm IPQ5332 SoC which recently got supported in upstream linux ath12k drivers... There are a few patches to make it work and the only blocking issue is with the Realtek switch connected to the LAN ports.
I am not a purist on the blob situation, there is no time to chase each one... GL.Inet folks seem to be good people, the product works.
BTW, even though there are mentions that OpenVPN is accelerated on this router, WireGuard is still times faster. I had to switch from ExpressVPN to Proton as ExpressVPN doesn't support WG profiles.
Very, very happy with my Flint 2. Rock solid.
Would you be able to set this up as a simple mesh with two units?
I have two old Amplifi HD units in wireless backhaul mesh that I’d like to upgrade
If the routers use OpenWrt then you can use mesh.
I have really liked my GL.iNet travel router, also with OpenWRT. I didn't think I would need a travel router but they're pretty handy.
I didn't realise routers like theirs existed, and had been paying through the nose for your standard brands like TPLink and hoping it didn't get popped.
> https://openwrt.org/voting/2025-02-12-openwrt-two
Glinet are doing a great job with their routers. I have the Beryl AX which is fully openwrt compatible. The new Beryl 7 is also fully compatible now. Mediatek chips might not be as high performance as Qualcomm but they make up in openness.
Edit: They just announced Flint 4 with a Mediatek chip:
https://www.gl-inet.com/en-gb/products/gl-be14000
Unfortunately the Flint 4 is still not available which lead me to get the https://openelab.io/a/s/products/banana-pi-bpi-r4-pro-1 instead.
Gl.Inet ships with their openwrt version. I have the last version and it can be flashed to vanilla openwrt or one a high speed branch. It’s been good and fast. I don’t need wifi 7 yet so I have time.
I run OpenWrt on 2 of my routers. It's really amazing the level of control. Although, I am now building a better approach: a mini PC as a managed linux router replacing my ISP (no wifi). Then my 2 wifi routers for wifi.
That router uses OpenWRT, but only official firmware can be installed. The Asus ZenWifi BT7 is currently widely recommended if you want to go OpenWRT Wifi7.
> expected availability is late '25.
T-T. Any update on the timeframe (and presumably also I would expect the expected price to be solidly in the mid to high 300s at this point)?
deleted.
Source? A cursory check on their website shows a Hong Kong and a US address. Some people seem to be claiming mainline China associations as well, which could be true, can't find anything on that in either direction.
But Israeli, no can't find that. Sure you didn't confuse it with some other company?
It looks like the person you replied to deleted their comment, but I assume it was about GL-iNet being a Chinese company.
They have a tiny Hong Kong office that handles marketing as well as a US office for technical support, but the entirety of engineering and manufacturing is in Shenzhen and Chengdu.
Because they provide a hosted site-to-site VPN service they are obligated to hold a B13 license. One of the conditions of which is the ability for the Chinese government to request access to devices worldwide.
I bought one of their travel routers to play with and even though it's OpenWRT based, I consider it Chinese firmware because they add their own stuff on top of it. The fact that it's even possible that it can be enrolled in their GoodCloud remote access....no thanks. I consider it an untrusted device except when I have stock OpenWRT on it. I know it's paranoia but companies like that marketing to the tech crowd/devs especially now with their KVM's just seems slightly fishy.
That is interesting (and I recommend you flash stock openwrt instead, I did on mine). But no, the parent comment I replied to claimed Israeli / IDF connections.
Apologies, you are right.
Why spread disinformation?
https://www.gl-inet.com/en-us/pages/about-us
My apologies. I must have confused them with someone else.
based
Why 7 (802.11be) when the bandwidth isn't really used? Genuine question. The GL-BE9300 mentioned here clocks in well within WiFi 5 range even.
I've got 10Gbps fiber at home (egregious, I know), and the only OpenWRT router I found that can saturate it is the Turris Omnia NG[0]. The price tag is a notch up from others but it's legitimately one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever owned. A perf3 test against an in-town server was able to pull 800 Megabytes per second; the router is no joke.
If you have a thick line to your ISP, I highly recommend!
[0]:https://www.turris.com/en/products/omnia-NG/
Less congestion in WiFi dense environments like apartment buildings due to the additional bandwidth and improved efficiency
Screw the max theoretical bandwidths for marketing, without 6 GHz (which would need 6E or 7) and the improved airtime efficiency I can barely get a few hundred jittery mbps standing next to my AP because the airspace is so crowded where I live.
Man how low does that aircraft fly?
My friend used to complain about UHF interference because he lived so close to the approach glidepath.
>I've got 10Gbps fiber at home (egregious, I know), and the only OpenWRT router I found that can saturate it is the Turris Omnia NG[0]. The price tag is a notch up from others but it's legitimately one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever owned.
Why not use OPNsense on a mini PC?
Apparently, WiFi is spotty on OPNsense. I did start looking into home grown options, but WiFi 7 with 10Gbit ethernet is no joke. Most hardware ends up being power-hungry and noisy.
The Omnia NG is fanless, meaning quiet and power-efficient. It's also small and relatively stylish. The small hardware LCD is very handy, and everything Just Works. The whole package is just so well put together.
Fanless is attractive on paper, but often means overheating and unreliable in practice. A large, slow fan in a bigger case is always better if you value reliability and a long service life. The best 10G router that you can buy is a low spec PC with a two-port 10G NIC. Make sure airflow is directed to the NIC (a PCI fan bracket is useful for that). WiFi is best handled by a dedicated access point, ideally the ceiling-mounted commercial type.
In my stress tests, I've not seen any issues with overheating. My 10G ONU connects to the router over an ethernet cable, and the SFP+ module that plugs into does get quite warm, though not hot enough to be uncomfortable.
How much does it cost? I was spooked when there were no prices on the website and it says only "email for quote".
Turris doesn't sell directly, AFAICT. The product page has links to distributors under the Order Now heading. They're selling for 500 EUR or so.
arggg, here comes my hardware lust again...
Is this actually stock OpenWRT?
I mean is it supported by vanilla OpenWRT image?
I do like the board though.
You can run vanilla if you want. Their Turris OS is just a custom distro with some added userspace niceties. One of the coolest is a snapshot system that reduces "unbricking" the device to just a menu click at bootup.
There are even people who have gotten NixOS running on it, apparently.
OpenWrt is a great piece of software(firmware) to prevent ISPs selling your browsing data to the advertisers. Although by now most ISPs are probably doing packet inspection.
It's easy to customize, I have a script to notify me when a new device connects to my router[1] and I also have a script to notify me when someone logins into my router[2].
Earlier I used to connect my openwrt router directly to the ISP's switch but now a days they've started to force their 'AI powered' router which is centrally managed. I now have to usee OpenWrt to defend against the ISP's router first and then the broader public network.
[1] https://abishekmuthian.com/openwrt-new-devices-connection-al...
[2] https://abishekmuthian.com/openwrt-login-alert/
> OpenWrt is a great piece of software(firmware) to prevent ISPs selling your browsing data to the advertisers.
Huh, how? Either ISPs are doing deep packet inspection, and can track your browsing data regardless of what firmware you run, or they don't, and it still doesn't matter what firmware you use on your switches/routers, you ISP still won't be able to see TLS traffic, which most internet traffic is today.
How does deep packet inspection work on encrypted traffic?
Until there's more wide support for Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), the SNI header in the TLS handshake is always sent in plaintext. Between that an unencrypted DNS, most routers can easily spot/log what you're accessing in a browser.
As some not deep into networking, just home(lab) stuff, learning OpenWRT took some time. But now cannot think of buying a router not for OpenWRT, once I learn what is possible I want to use it.
Fot example from my ISP I can have two options for PPPoE connection, first is legacy IPv4 only but lacks IPv6, second is IPv4 but behind CGNAT and with modern IPv6. With OpenWRT, I am able to make two PPPoE connection over the same wire and have the best of both worlds.
Combining the WiFi with the router never made sense to me. Routers can last a long time and WiFi gets new versions with new capabilities every few years.
I would rather just connect a separate wireless AP to my switch, preferably also with PoE. And then I can upgrade and expand that as needed while leaving the perfectly fine router alone.
I just bought a house and this was the conclusion I came to. A cheap PoE-capable multigig switch and a single Omada access point cost about the same as a cheap WiFi 7-capable router would have. I did opt to run the Omada Controller software on a Raspberry Pi instead of buying a hardware controller (to save a few bucks); maybe if I had a lot more hardware it'd make sense but for my one AP it's more than capable. So far I'm quite pleased, it gives me the peace-of-mind knowing that WiFi upgrades are effectively plug-and-play - plug in the AP, adopt it in the controller, add it to the site, and the existing network is already being broadcast - no more router reconfiguration every few years!
Hopefully, dual 2.5gbe too?
The other devices based on the same filogic chip do have dual 2.5Gbps at least.
You can get a Wifi 7 device and 2x2.5GBps with Wifi 7 support already with the Asus BT8 and a few other devices. Asus's bootloader firmware flasher will take the initial OpenWRT image so its really quite simple to get going.
How will it handle PPPoE at gigabit speeds? I've been wanting to replace by terrible router from my ISP, but the options that can handle gigabit+ PPPoE are limited.
Very well, IIRC I have measured its capability to route at about 16gbps IIRC although that isn't PPPoE just the usual iperf test, it handles my 1.2gbps without any drama.
I'm hoping for one with at least two 10Gbps ethernet ports (one for upstream, one for downstream). Ideally more, but two would be great.
You might be interested in the Turris Omnia NG which has two 10g SFP+ ports:
https://www.turris.com/en/products/omnia-NG-wired/
I've been hunting for a good switch with at least two 10Gbps ports too, surprisingly hard to find today still. I've ended up with a XGS1250-12 (3 10Gbps ports) for now, but OpenWrt support isn't great, the ports end up 1Gbps (or some other similar problem, not sure I remember the details 100%), so still running Zyxel firmware which, well, isn't OpenWrt... Other people here might have recommendations for suitable switches with good OpenWrt support?
https://mono.si/
Does it have WiFi 7? If so, list the details please.
Why choose this over the https://openelab.io/a/s/products/banana-pi-bpi-r4-pro-1 ?
Is there a version of the Banana Pi kit that comes with all of the dozen carefully positioned antennas desirable for a tri-band or quad-band wifi 7 setup?
> I wouldn't buy a commercial router that wasn't supported by OpenWRT now.
Is there any closed-sourced firmware that exceeds OpenWRT performance on the same level of hardware?
I think that some proprietary firmware may have hardware optimizations that aren’t possible in a community-developed environment.
The Two at least seems to have some features to it. Albeit catering to home ethernet enthusiasts.
I would really love to see something like this with just 10 sfp cages, no switching all routed interfaces. A real open source alternative to mikrotik.
Off topic, but what amuses me about the "Wrt" name is that it was originally alternate firmware for the Linksys WRT54G router from 25 years ago. The name has stuck for whatever reason; I guess since only geeks use it and know what it is.
I'm pretty sure the software side of the project is a direct descendent from the WRT54G stack.
LinkSys got sued to release the firmware as it was GPL linked. This dump got modified to make the WRT54G way more powerful than LinkSys ever planned but they got to sell the hardware for years more than would have been expected at the time.
Yeah it was so popular they even released a specific WRT54GL model (where the L stands for Linux) in order to keep supporting third-party firmware after the main hardware series moved on to a more optimized VxWorks-based OS that let them ship less RAM and Flash.
A mainstream hardware company releasing a specific product SKU to support third party firmware really sounds crazy from the perspective of the current market where a substantial portion of the value in selling hardware is supposed to come from subscriptions and surveillance.
Yeah, I loved it because it allowed me to boost the signal above FCC-approved power requirements and saturate my house with that sweet 2.4GHz connection everywhere.
It is basically always better to run more APs at lower power in the areas where you need coverage, than to boost the power. Especially today with the radio spectrum being so congested.
Despite this, I could expect 3-5 people to hunt me down at PyCon when I was running the wireless to tell me that I had misconfigured the wifi because it was set to low power. More reports of that than reports of wifi not working, IIRC. ;-)
(I was running the wireless because the people we paid do to the wifi would just set up one or two APs and crank the power)
Please travel back to 2003 and talk to old me when I could only afford one AP and had no idea how to make them work in concert together. :)
> It is basically always better to run more APs at lower power in the areas where you need coverage, than to boost the power.
Only if your clients are competent at roaming.
FYI: I've never had any problems with that. Back in the mid-2000s I was running the WiFi for 1000+ people at a time at conferences for 3-4 years, and basically had no complaints.
Looking at you, Nintendo Switch 1 and 2. Yes, the 2, in 2026.
Good to know
I used corner reflectors made from roof flashing and cardboard on mine. Worked really well to get the signal from one corner of my apt to the other.
Yeah, Linksys made a killing from this and the WRT54GS 2.0 because of OpenWRT.
> it was originally alternate firmware for the Linksys WRT54G router from 25 years ago
There's a couple of fun examples like that. xda-developers is named after the O2 xda, a smartphone from 25 years ago that not many people ended up developing software for.
Recycled 4 or so WRT54G variants a couple years ago I ran Tomato on for friend's small businesses and my home in early 2000's.
I miss the Tomato UI/UX... I don't care for LUCU or OpnSense's UI by comparison...
Been using OpnSense for about 8 years now though... it's just been the best option for me, I use separate commercial AP.
FreshTomato is still active, and they are doing x86 builds now. I'm running it on an aging Netgear R7000 and it has been stable.
May just take a look at it... I'm not doing much with OpnSense, I'm running RPi on a separate system, that I'd like to integrate into DNS on the router itself, but that's about it. The only other feature I want to use but haven't configured is auto failover to a cellular modem. It's cheap, and enough for work, but not great for heavy use.
I used OPNSense briefly when I got 1gig synchronous fiber ~2015 at home on an old i5 desktop, which I think was shortly after the pfSense fork, and then found Mikrotik and RouterOS. Used RouterOS at home since and have been replacing aged out Cisco switches in the datacenter (100gig) and closets (20-40gig) cheaply. I'm looking to dump a handful of ASA's for OPNSense and the messing around I've done so far has been positive. It's aged nicely.
Similar to XBMC at least for a long time.
I still have a WRT54GL sitting in a box somewhere.
The best model of the WRT54G line. I would snag them at thrift stores for cheap to use for silly utility functions. I always referred to that particular model as "The highly-coveted WRT54GL."
I used a pair to provide Internet access at a Customer's construction site back in 2010. Cell phone hotspot wasn't a thing for me yet. We took a pair of WRT54Gs, configured one as a WiFi client, the other as a bog-standard router/AP, connected the LAN from the client to the WAN on the router/AP, pur a directional antenna onto the "client", and pointed it down the road toward a big business who offered free WiFi for Customers. We leeched off that until the real Internet service got installed. (It was a restaurant and we ate there at least once so we were Customers, right? >smile<)
It seems crazy to me that Linksys didn't look at the success of the WRT54GL and the higher prices they commanded and decide to just keep doing that. Why every company feels the need to roll their own firmware that is buggy, slow, crashy, and doesn't implement half of the promised functionality properly is still baffling to me.
Companies roll their own, I think, because of a combination of Not Invented Here and secret-sauce binary blobs. They work within the script that the chipset/radio maker gives them to follow.
---
They don't often offer inexpensive, deliberately-hackable units like the WRT54GL, I think, because of support costs.
And by "support costs," I don't mean that it was expensive to hold users' hands while they installed custom firmware -- that's never been a service that has been provided.
Instead, I mean that there are people who start goofing with this stuff and run out of skill when hacking close-ish to the metal on this kind of hardware. They don't know how to get themselves out of a jam and unbrick their device.
So they find a way to lie their way into getting an RMA and get the device replaced under warranty, and that's expensive for companies to deal with.
(Those people fucking suck.)
Let's also not forget that there are multiple governments lining up to "politely request" firmware backdoors.
It's disappointing that we still have terrible "press 9 buttons at the same time while reciting from the Necronomicon and plugging in and out the device" recovery stories.
Put the firmware and config on a ** uSD card, or set up some sort of UF2 recovery mode. Then no matter how badly you bollix it up, the answer is "plug it into your computer, download the big prominent "factory image", and drag it onto the device.
If done right, you could even do stuff like "clone the SD card so you can deploy identically-configured units for every branch of your chain business."
Used to work for that model. Great device for it’s time.
Well we still use Roman months and weekdays, and carry over the 30/31 days months even though we could’ve had a way better system by now (base 10 and equal divisions)
Did WRT mean anything? Wireless RouTer?
Wireless Router or Wireless Router Technology is the common interpretation, but to my knowledge, Linksys has never officially confirmed this.
What a coincidence to see this on the front page!
I just received my OpenWrt One because I’m tired of dealing with the questionable quality of most routers.
And I don’t feel like resurrecting my old PC that I used as a router for a while. I stopped doing that because it’s loud. Pretty sure the power supply fan is about to fly off.
But Qualcomm WiFi pci card with giant antenna in a dirt cheap PC running ancient Ubuntu and a simple hostapd setup is so far the most reliable WiFi router I’ve ever had. I hope openwrt one is even better :-)
In case it is not, an old PC with a dual port Intel NIC running OPNSense is so far the best router I have ever used. I mean rock solid performance with near zero maintenance beyond adjusting VLANs and setting up a 6in4 tunnel over the past 5 years solid. My home network is larger, more diverse, and more complex than what I suspect most people have, with several hundred devices and yet I log into the OPNSense UI maybe twice a year and usually just out of curiosity.
The learning curve is a little steeper than more consumer stuff but it is by no means beyond a person who is capable of using OpenWRT and the docs and forum support are better than 99.9% of open source projects I have seen over the past 25 years.
Hi I tried with OPNSense, but I use a screen reader they made a big song and dance about fixing 11y on there web interface. In the end they did fuck all. OpenWRT has bin good with a screen reader since the start and the few times I have pointed out things to be fixed they have bin fixed with in days. So yeah go OpenWRT.
That is a very solid argument against OPNSense! I do wonder if the advent of AI can be used to fix issues like this, but in the meantime I totally see why you would choose OpenWRT.
I don't disagree, however using an old PC as a router almost certainly wastes an enormous among of power. An old non-gaming PC could use 70kWh of power a month if running continuously (as a router would), which is around 11 a month and almost 140 a year. At that price you could just buy a nice router, or an OpenWrt One which will possibly also have newer, faster WiFi standards (WiFi 6)
For some real numbers, I picked up a 2018 generic office PC (Core i5-7500) used for $50 as a backup machine to run linux on when my laptop was in for repairs, and it idles at 14 W, vs the OpenWrt One which appears to run at 5.5 W.
So that's 10 kWh/mo for the PC vs 4 kWh/mo for the OpenWrt One.
Yep, and that's anywhere from about $1.30 to $3 something in the really expensive states for electric rates in the US. Half that if you only count the delta between that and a low power device.
Spending hundreds on new hw to save $20 a year in power cost.
I currently use an old boring HP tower. Nothing fancy, I think it’s a quad core AMD APU. But if building it from scratch I would get a $35 thin client off eBay and stick a NIC in it. The CPU load is minimal as the network card does all the processing. I do have 8 TP-Link access points and a hardware controller as well as three unmanaged PoE switches for the Wi-Fi but that would be the case regardless of what my router is.
>however using an old PC as a router almost certainly wastes an enormous among of power
I don't think you're quite right on this, or at least you're imagining using something inappropriate when the comparison here involves buying something new right? So it's not "OpenWrt One" vs "whatever you happen to have in your closet" but "OpenWrt One (~$110-130)" vs "whatever can be bought used for $110-130, if you have nothing appropriate". And while they won't go to near-zero like some ARM stuff might, idle power for PCs improved a ton after around the 2013 era. There are lots and lots of small systems available for equivalent prices on Ebay or the like made since then (like Intel NUCs or various other mini PCs) that will idle around 4-10W. Like to take something in the same price range as this OpenWrt One, I regularly see 7th gen era NUCs going for <$140. An i5-7260U will have single threaded performance about the same as the MediaTek in this unit and multi-thread close, but will also generally have 8-16 GB of RAM and often a 250-500GB NVMe drive as well. It'll probably have only one native ethernet, but USB or TB adapters work fine with Linux & FreeBSD at this point.
There's definitely a question of values and exactly what you're trying to focus on, but there are a lot of niceties in having lots of RAM on tap and extremely standard fallbacks to interface with a system, back it up, etc.
>or an OpenWrt One which will possibly also have newer, faster WiFi standards (WiFi 6)
If you want an AIO style device that's definitely a consideration, though again USB WiFi dongles are a thing too. But regardless of router choice, for someone considering going beyond what their ISP offers at all I think it's usually well worth spending the $50-80 to get a dedicated wireless access point. It'll make a major difference in real world performance in most spaces I've seen to just physically have a unit in an ideal spot (on a ceiling or high up on a wall, away from metal). Aesthetically the clean disks or rectangles those tend to have also blend well and mean that various boxes can be tucked away. And of course you get to upgrade networking bits separately from your router.
Anyway, definitely good there are multiple approaches, this is an area of life where people can have very different needs driven by very different physical environments and "stakeholders" (like significant others). But I think OPNsense (or other bog-standard-PC FOSS alternatives like VyOS) can be competitive even in TCO, depending on how much value you place on pushing your networking stack and what else you have going on (like solar power).
I use an m920q as my router and it idles around 5W.
That makes sense, but I really do have to emphasize just how gloriously stable my old PC router setup was.
It was the most incredibly hassle free router I've ever had.
Hopefully, the OpenWrt One is like that. But if not, I'm going to go back to killing the planet with my loud ass beater PC.
[dead]
>I just received my OpenWrt One because I’m tired of dealing with the questionable quality of most routers.
My latest 3 home routers have been mikrotik, mikrotik and juniper.
And the Juniper is still in there, just running as a switch. The old juniper srx sucks at uPNP but is otherwise still a fantastic router if I wanted to swap back to it.
Middle tier mikrotik took a power surge and lost 50% of its ports. It still routed just enough for me to get a replacement.
Latest tik is doing great.
I dont see what the One offers me at all tbh.
"Enterprise class" wifi routers from ten years ago sell on eBay for about 1/5th as much, and work just as well for most home or small business applications.
It's worth being careful here: a lot of the affordable enterprise-class routers from 10+ years ago aren't as fast as cheap consumer hardware - like the OP or just a decent mini PC. The primary arguments for the enterprise-class gear are around feature availability and certain aspects of reliability (redundant power/fans, better heat tolerance, higher quality components). It's also worth remembering that this kind of gear tends to be built for dedicated environments: loud fans, higher power draw/lack of power saving features, etc.
Beside the potential performance and environmental issues the other big downsides tend to include firmware availability - either because download from the site requires a login on the vendor's site or, increasingly commonly, the gear has hit LDOS and images just aren't posted. Obviously there are other "unofficial" places for such images, but the risk/legality are a whole other (potentially serious) question.
There's an additional issue mapping the requirements of home networking to enterprise gear: Ethernet switches are lousy firewalls (little or no NAT, primitive built-in security, DLNA/mDNS and friends aren't really sane options, etc). Finally, even at "1/5" the price the gear may still be quite a bit more expensive than other options. And if it's not expensive, it's usually because nobody wants it any more because of the issues mentioned above (being near- or beyond- LDOS).
FWIW this is from someone who literally built a commercial-class machine room in his house with dedicated AC, subpanels, commercial UPS, etc for data center class Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Infiniband switching as well as carrier-grade routers and still runs "enterprise" grade WLAN and switching and can lay hands on as much as I could reasonably want without too much drama or cost... Going down this road can absolutely be amazing if you either have a.) the background to properly source and run the hardware/software or b.) have a driving desire to learn how to do so or c.) have some very atypical requirements for home networking. Otherwise it tends to not be something to be done lightly.
Aren't they also missing security patches? I'm not sure about you, but I'd rather have SOHO routers with up to date firmware, than enterprise routers with out of date firmware.
No I’m saying load openwrt on them.
How about OPNSense on open hardware of your choice, and passing messy wireless to separate AP?
OpenWRT is very good, but the installation and upgrades are not easy. There is a zoo of images for different hardware, installation options and tools. It has to run on small devices, so there are limitations. The documentation on Wiki is scattered and could be improved.
I had to search forums for weeks for a custom package installation for my router. Right now I have been trying to upgrade to the latest version via LUCI for a while, and it stucks. Probably have to wait for few weeks, go through CLI and maybe search forums again.
I just thought I am paying a hefty time price for a bit more expensive x86 mini pc and AP.
Your OpenWrt ecosystem knowledge seems oudated; upgrades are a solved problem since the advent of "Attended Sysupgrade": https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/attended.sy...
It's been included in all suitable default image configurations starting with OpenWrt release 25.12.
I do run OpenWrt on my x86-based router, on my AP, and even on my managed switches, and have no regrets.
So an image released in March? I’m not sure I’d proclaim it completely solved when it’s been ga for all of three months.
With the 25.12 release, the luci app to use ASU for upgrades became installed by default in OpenWrt's "vanilla" images the project builds and provides for supported hardware and devices.
Previous OpenWrt releases at least as far back as 21.02 could be equipped with the same degree of ASU support by installing a single package (luci-app-attendedsysupgrade) and its dependencies.
Indeed, I was referring to Attended Sysupgrade in luci or CLI.
What switches are you running it on?
Netgear GS308T, Netgear GS108T v3, and HPE JG925A.
>OpenWRT is very good, but the installation and upgrades are not easy.
The solution is to use image-builder and bake your config into the image.
All of that is a nope. The solution is that a router should have a standard unattended upgrade system built into it that is on by default and pulls from the stable release stream, preserves your configuration automatically with a 100% guarantee of it working, automatically falls back to the last known working image if the update fails, and has a way to notify you of what’s going on with it. This must work out of the box with the first install without you having to do anything at all or even be aware of it except perhaps setting the time of day and day of week/month when the router is allowed to reboot itself for the upgrades (but the default should be set automatically by the system). Anything less than that is simply broken for anything that is considered production quality. Words like “image builder” and “config baked into the image” are for those developing the system, not end users.
> The solution is that a router should have a standard unattended upgrade system built into it that is on by default...
Mmm, no. Unexpected downtime for infrastructure is godawful... just ask Windows Home users.
OpenWRT has a "Click a button to upgrade" thing, just like just about every consumer/prosumer-grade equipment does. [0] It also has a command-line tool that one can use to automate upgrades, for environments where the phrase "production grade" is actually an important thing to think about. [1]
[0] <https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/attended.sy...> [2]
[1] <https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/sysupgrade....> [2]
[2] Those documents mention that you need to install some things to get operator-initiated upgrades. As of March, the button to click is installed by default, and the CLI tool is installed on systems that have enough disk space for it. [3]
[3] <https://openwrt.org/releases/25.12/notes-25.12.0#integration...>
hahaha You try building that all in to a small flash chip mate. Good luck!
That’s why I prefer things like Debian, OPNSense, etc. It IS hard. But that doesn’t mean that not doing it should be considered a done deal.
A multitude of router products manage to do this.
Upgrades are “owut upgrade” these days. Pretty straightforward.
Maybe so. The documentation seems to be all over the map, and the GUI suggests using "attended sysupgrade" for upgrades.
...which I tried doing, a week or so ago, for a minor point release update within the 25.12.x series. And then the router went out to lunch and didn't come back.
Getting it going again wasn't so bad as such things go. My router has a huge advantage here in that it's a Raspberry Pi 4, so it's easy to remove/replace/re-do the flash device and start over.
(Except: I get all out of sorts when I need to do Internet stuff to fix my Internet connection while that Internet connection is absent.)
Yeah, for non-X86 devices, getting to U-boot with pressing a combination of PINs in particular order and conditions and releasing at right time is a pain.
I think I wasted $100,000 in salary for $100 more in device cost, in setting up an OpenWRT router.
Apart from installation and upgrades, the OS itself is nice, very flexible and capable.
Well-said.
I've got other options for routing hardware and software (of course I do), but I generally keeping using OpenWRT. Looking back, it seems like I've had it around in some form or other in active use for about 20 years so far.
Part of what keeps it around is the flexibility and the home-network-centric hack-value. I mean, this whole thing grew out of a shell injection exploit on a Linksys WRT54G. :)
Anyway, it can keep whatever counts as a slow WAN connection today feeling responsive and quick with cake SQM, even while loaded heavy with traffic and users. It's nice in that way, even though enterprise types don't seem to be interested in that kind of thing at all.
I could take a nice Juniper router home from work to use instead and it would absolutely trounce the packet-forwarding performance of my cheap OpenWRT box...while also doing nothing at all to make my home-gamer WAN limitations more tolerable.
So OpenWRT is still my answer, with the warts and upgrade woes and all.
> OpenWRT is very good, but the installation and upgrades are not easy.
Agreed that separate router and dumb AP is the way. Every time I updated OpenWRT there was some gotcha that created an unexpected headache where I had to rebuild my elaborate configuration from scratch.
I'm not convinced A -> G upgrade paths are tested, only A -> B -> ... -> F -> G but who manually updates with that level of discipline?
You're right, it's interesting that this device isn't the most technically superior in hardware or software, and isn't the most casual user friendly. It seems to be targeting a segment I can't bucket other than loyalists. Maybe good hardware & software for the cost?
> How about OPNSense on open hardware of your choice
Yes, it's a possibility, but if you want to tinker, I think a plain Linux distro like Debian is better. Turning it into a router is literally a couple of kernel parameters and a few iptables rules to set up NAT. Nowadays that's less than fives minutes of work with Claude.
This buys you much better performance and hardware compatibility relative to a BSD system, as well as lower resource usage and attack surface (no GUI or other unnecessary additions). WiFi support on BSD is bad, but on Linux you can use hostapd and almost immediately get an access point for free. And of course Linux is also better if you intend to run other stuff on the same hardware.
But what if you don't want to tinker? I switched to OPNsense as a direct replacement for our Asus "WiFi routers", and it has been phenomenal, reliable, and does everything needed - when you just want it to work, it really just does. But when you want more advanced functions, there are tons of plugins and stuff that you can run natively, while still having a true CLI.
I suppose it comes down to what you said - "if you intend to run other stuff on the same hardware." Is it a good idea to run all sorts of extra stuff on your literal firewall/router? And if you did, I'd assume using a hypervisor is safer anyway? That way you can have the GUI and reliability of OPNsense but have a Linux distro beside it.
You also said that Linux has much better performance vs BSD, which seems rather far fetched. Got any data for that?
One other thing: OPNsense comes with a ton of helpful rules to eliminate bot traffic, allow IPv6, different NATs, VLANS, etc which you'd have to add manually. Not the end of the world, but worth considering.
> Is it a good idea to run all sorts of extra stuff on your literal firewall/router?
I don't see any reason not to. I run dozens on services, both bare metal and containerized (Podman) on my router/firewall. It doubles as an all-purpose home server with plenty of headroom to spare. It's just a computer that sits at the edge of my network, and running services meant to be exposed to the Internet on it is natural.
> You also said that Linux has much better performance vs BSD, which seems rather far fetched. Got any data for that?
I should have worded this more carefully. What tends to happen is that BSD has worse (or no) drivers, that's when BSD's performance can noticeably degrade vs. Linux. From memory, people online were reporting issues with Realtek chips. With Intel NICs, the routing performance should be broadly equivalent .
Ah, I see. Well, that does make more sense now. I guess just have a surplus of mini PCs so for me it makes more sense to run one routing box and one server box, but I know how much use cases vary.
I agree about Intel vs Realtek to some extent. My Lenovo M73 OPNsense actually has a 2.5G Realtek mPCIe NIC on the LAN side and it has actually been pretty great and reliable so far! Transmit maxes out early at 2.28Gbps-ish but receive is 2.47Gbps (Jumbo). However, the other week it glitched out and reported UP but was actually unresponsive. I'm still looking for an mPCI Intel i226-V version of the same thing...
The only downside to your solution is that most people (me included) would rather have auto generated configs so that you don't accidentally expose everything to Internet or break everything with an iptables rule, but that's down to experience I'm sure.
Please support your claim about (networking) performance of BSD-based systems and Linux with some source(s). It surprised me. Thank you.
Anecdotal, but I was never able to get FreeBSD (TrueNAS CORE, OpnSense) to get anywhere near 10 Gbps. Using Mellanox or Intel NICs. The Linux equivalents (TrueNAS SCALE, OpenWrt) handled it fine on the same hardware.
Thats more or less what I did, and nix just made sense for the job. For 99% of people I'd say no its not worth it to tinker, just go with opnsense virtualized so you get at least some the benefits of the better linux drivers. By that I mean NBASE-T on various intel chips and while intel's igb is fairly solid on unixes many other vendors' drivers are less so. However if you're willing to figure out configuring per your needs you definitely can get a lower latency router with all the same capabilities and more, with it's components more sanely isolated via containers.
Some people want a webinterface tho.
I agree on the upgrade story, though supposedly the recent move to apk will help in that regard.
I moved from pfSense to OpenWRT due to the really poor IPv6 support in pfSense. I don't use the AP capability either. How are things in OPNSense these days?
Particular pain points from pfSense was that it published global IP as DNS address to LAN clients and no way around it, so connectivity broke every time prefix changed, and no real support for specifying prefix-less firewall rules or similar, so couldn't really expose anything via IPv6 without pain.
$106usd or $84usd without a case and antennas. That’s a solid price. Wish it had more than 1gb ram - goddamn datacenters.
Without performing any work at all to optimize RAM usage: My all-singing, all-dancing OpenWRT router projects have always used less than 100MB of RAM. These days, they usually occupy less than 64MB.
1GB is a ton of RAM for this kind of application. :) What do you anticipate needing more for?
Blocky/pihole type stuff is what comes to front of mind, which probably fits but add anything else and now you’re hitting the limit.
I run my Pihole on the first Pi... the 256mb version.
I also have a RPi3 with Pihole, Unbound, and Tailscale... for Tailscale: Still plenty of space in 1GB of ram, and OpenWRT is probably a bit more compact than DietPi.How many blocklists does one need to have in order for them to use >900 megabytes of RAM?
I mean, there is a lot of spam on the internet.
But pihole asks for a pi with 512gb ram. Add openwrt’s 100mb, now your ram budget for running something else (file server, pairdrop, irc, tailscale, etc) is <400mb. One nodejs app could use all of that.
pihole is based on glibc, uses GNU utils and being based in Debian probably it's not compiled to optimize space. OpenWRT is based on musl, uses busybox, it is space contrained and size matters.
Motorbike analogy, it's like comparing a RS125 with a Tmax/Burgman maxiscooter...
I mean:
On one hand, 400MB is still a ton of RAM to do useful work with -- and unused RAM is wasted RAM.
On the other hand: How many non-routing tasks do you really expect or require a ~$100 home-router-device to perform? :)
I'm old, "Unused RAM is wasted RAM" goes against my philosophy. Back in my days, a professor said in class: you want your OS as light as possible, so the more free resources you have, the faster Quake will run (by the time, Quake was software rendered). Saving resources for a rainy day today is better than saying "umbrellas are too expensive" tomorrow.
Require? Just OpenWRT + blocky. Expect? As much as I can get! I run a full home server, but if I could offload some things to a router, i would.
Right. I often do a lot of things with openwrt, too. They've just all happened to fit within ~100MB, historically.
And even then, I try to keep it vaguely "minimal." I don't offload as much as I can; I try to keep the router-box focused mostly on router-duties. This is because I don't want to have too many dependencies within the router: I'm really not looking to create trouble with the single-point-of-failure device that connects everything I have to the rest of the world.
This is in large part for very practical reasons. If I manage to completely stuff up the router somehow, which isn't particularly unlikely, then I really need to be able to put it back together quickly (so I'm back online quickly) without worrying about a pile of non-routing things.
If I were to put as much stuff as possible into openwrt (as I certainly can; it is just a Linux box after all), then I think I'd quickly find that it'd be better to spin up OpenWRT in a VM on a Real Computer than to keep trying to shoehorn new roles into deliberately-limited hardware.
But maybe that's just me. I got over the idea of running weird stuff on tiny hardware for the lulz nearly 20 years ago, when I was playing with a new WD MyBook World Edition 1TB networked hard drive (which was a Linux box with a shell and a package manager and a whole terabyte of local storage, even though the the sum of the parts was slow AF).
It was fun for a bit to push that limited hardware in interesting ways, and I probably did even run an IRC client on it at some point, but I'm over it. :)
Not even for the OS itself, but for the freaking wifi send / receive windows...
If someone is interested in open hardware running openwrt, also check out Turris.
https://www.turris.com/en/
I have been using them for years and I'm really happy. I recently bought the WiFi 6 upgrade kit for both of my turris. They "recently" released their latest version which is expensive but comes with WiFi 7 and 2.5 Gbps RJ45 and 10 Gbps SPF.
Are you certain this is running OpenWRT? As in, can I get a OpenWRT build and flash it to the router and have it work?
The Turis Omnia runs a derivative of OpenWrt. They provide a custom UI with an option to switch to LuCI. It's easy to flash it to upstream OpenWRT, which is what I do.
They maintain their own fork and they say that they contribute stuff upstream (not sure how much, though).
Last time I checked (a couple years ago), it seemed that I could use OpenWRT but I would lose some functionality (was it the FTT maybe?).
Since we're talking WiFi, I'll mention
https://www.wiisfi.com/
The single best wifi reference I've found to date.
This is awesome, thank you for sharing.
This answers so many questions that I had but never had the true desire to research every niche WiFi term.
I have and love my OpenWrt One for my main router. I have two, so that I have a backup one I can switch to if the first one ever dies. It is the best device to run OpenWrt on as it is fully supported hardware that has great images/packages for it. Routing speeds/buffer/latency are great, everything just works, price is very reasonable.
I don't use it for my APs, but that is mostly because I already had 3 TP-Link routers setup as dumb APs using OpenWrt that have been working great. If I did it again, I'd buy OpenWrt Ones though. Although Deco mesh kits I've used have worked exceptionally well, and have become my recommendation for friends/family that don't want to do things like run arbitrary packages on their router/APs.
I have 4 OpenWRT Ones and they are good.
If you just want a good WiFi router or access point, unless you need something cannot do (e.g. WiFi 7 or 10 Gbit/s Ethernet), and if want to spend minimal time messing around with routers today and in the future, just get this one.
After getting this, I see no reason to ever buy any closed-source router again.
No need to learn/remember any other Router config either. It's just all OpenWRT, always looks the same, always works the same. Setting up a new one takes me 2 minutes max.
The recent OpenWRT update also brought the one feature the project was most sorely missing: A simple "Download and install latest firmware" button in the device UI.
Now they just need to add an unattended-upgrades option and I never have to log in again after initial setup.
another happy user here too. having openwrt with all features working and no tinkering out of the box (since it's their reference target) is a dream. this, plus the warm fuzzies of buying open-source, makes it worth it to me even with the 1GBps limitation and outdated WiFi (i use a separate AP anyway, like you). i swapped my ports in software to have 1GB WAN and 2.5GB LAN (which also lets me power the router with PoE, which i have coming in on the LAN port).
It's got only one LAN ethernet port. Do you use only wifi or did you add a switch between the router and your devices?
I have it going into a 16-port gigabit switch, which my OpenWrt-based APs and wired devices are hooked into.
Didn't they position it as a "development board" that happens to be a router?
Personally I find vanilla Sinovoip (aka "BananaPi") products to be more interesting. OpenWRT One adds strange connectors but for some reason removes R2/3/4's cellular-focused PCIe-but-actually-USB slot, M.2 slot, and leaves just one LAN port.
I've recently been test driving SPR[1] which is a security-oriented distro for Wi-Fi routers. The team behind it are serious about Wi-Fi security and have a research lab[2] that has been credited with several CVEs in the likes of Apple's network stack. The headline feature is strong device isolation for semi-trusted guest and home automation devices, and the software stack is based around containerized and audited Go daemons.
It ran pretty well for me as a travel router I cobbled together from a Raspberry Pi and Netgear A7500 USB dongle for a stay in a short-term rental where the infrastructure network was shared with other units. More recently I have been trialing their CM5-based model with Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5GbE PoE for use as primary home Wi-Fi.
1: https://www.supernetworks.org 2: https://www.supernetworks.org/security-labs.html
I switched from a Google Wifi to this and found it to be just as stable, but with better range/signal strength, and easier to apply the parental controls I want.
Does it have parental controls natively or did you have to install something extra?
I would love to be able to whitelist which devices are allowed to access the internet during night time hours.
I do it the opposite way, disable my kids' devices at night, but I suspect your desired method would also be supported using native features. I have found LLMs to be very helpful in providing the right settings.
There is a plugin marketplace that provides more features, like ad-blocking. I haven't played with those yet, so I cannot vouch for them.
I use opnsense with an aliexpress n100 router. It works very well and I enjoy it. But upgrades scare the crap out of me. I've only had 1 upgrade where things went bad. I have zfs snapshots and everything, but just because its a headless unit, I get super anxiety upgrading the system waiting for the beeps for it to come back online.
I virtualize mine with proxmox and pass the necessary NICs through to the VM. Snapshots make rollbacks a breeze. You can also run HA pairs if you want to do updates without downtime.
How much did you pay for it?
$200.93 shipped in April 2024 with a wall bracket. No storage or ram though, but it was cheap at the time.
This is the official shop page afaict: https://www.bpi-shop.com/products/banana-pi-openwrt-one-rout...
As someone who knows very little about WiFi, I always thought it sucked that if you wanted to go from 802.11this to 802.11that, it always requires brand new hardware with a different WiFi chip that implemented the new standard. Is there a good reason that software-defined 802.11 doesn't exist and that every new standard requires a different radio+SoC?
Radio modulation / coding (at least for 802.11) benefits greatly from paralelism (lots of matrix multiplication etc).
I imagine that using an ASIC is way more cost efficient vs using a CPU.
One example is the introduction of MIMO, a technique to send multiple data streams in the same frequency band in parallel. This requires multiple antennas, i.e. hardware which wasn't there in the previous wifi version. Note this was 2009.
Just two Ethernet ports (1+2.5GbE), and it’s dual-band (no 6GHz)… I’m not sure who’s the target audience or what’s the use case.
A 5 port 2.5GbE switch would upgrade this to 5 total ports (4x 2.5GbE), and costs less than $100. If you only need 1GbE then it's even cheaper.
Outside of home-labs, it's rare for me to see any devices connected to the LAN side of a wireless router these days, and more than 1 (i.e. the non-portable device that is closest to the router) is exceedingly rare.
>Outside of home-labs, it's rare for me to see any devices connected to the LAN side of a wireless router these days
I would assume every gaming desktop computer would be? I actually assumed every desktop would be...
Neither my parents nor my wife's parents have their desktop connected to their router. The cable modem isn't even in the same room as the desktop.
[edit]
If it matters, my mom no longer has a desktop (she uses a docked laptop now), but it is true of the docking station and was true of her previous desktop.
Chaining a switch off the gateway is the best way to do it anyway. If you do that, then when you reboot your gateway, your lan devices do not lose their physical link and can continue talking to each other.
2.5 is the WAN, so your lan is only getting 1g anyway
With OpenWRT, the network interfaces are whatever you want them to be. That's one of the perks. :)
Ok, so your wan is 1gig, and your lan 2.5...handy but not much of a perk. Lets just call this an AP, which would clear up many issues people seem to have with it
It depends.
It'd be handy for me: The fastest WAN pipe I can get is less than a gigabit while my LAN is still gigabit. I can't be the only person with this situation, wherein: If anything, then the 2.5-gig port is overkill.
I don't have any direct interest in the wifi radio that the box includes (I already have Mikrotik APs that I like just fine), except to configure it as a failover station-mode interface to use with a phone hotspot when the DOCSIS connection is on the fritz.
...which doesn't happen often at all, but it's annoying when it does happen. It's nice to be able to work around problems like that with OpenWRT.
> If anything, then the 2.5-gig port is overkill.
Or 1 gig is underkill. My original reply was just pointing out that simply adding a 2.5g switch doesn't make it a 5 port 2.5g router, it makes it a 1 gig router with 2.5 internal, at best
It is indeed a strange choice to include only two interfaces, and then make each of them different speeds.
Realistically, the wireless side is unlikely to saturate a 1-gig pipe. If the 2.5g is used for WAN because the WAN can use that extra speed, then it's very likely that the LAN port becomes saturated. The configuration never really fits.
The best use I can come up with is this: A 2.5-gig managed switch and PoE with a tiny bit of VLAN magic does allow the OpenWrt One to be an access point+router that can be located in a spot that is good for RF propagation, with only 1 wire connected to it for both power and data. In this configuration, it route packets with up to ~1.25g of WAN (or perhaps more, if WAN is asymmetric).
But even though VLANs are fun and I wish more people knew how to use them effectively, that's so corner case that I'd never rationally expect anybody to actually use it that way. :) And it forces WAN traffic to contend with local WLAN traffic for that shared pipe, which introduces fun new ways for networks to slow down.
That's enough connectivity for a gigabit WAN pipe and a LAN full of stuff (including one or more better/faster APs), if a person wants to slice it up that way.
It’s for developers as far as I understand, it’s not meant to buy as a consumer router. There is far better hardware you can get that runs OpenWRT.
It does raise the question that if it is for developers, what exactly is being developed? Especially if its not representative of hardware that is available or desired; is there some advantage targeting a very particular chipset? This seems to be the only device using it (from what i could find briefly)
I have one of these and love it, especially after I once bricked it during a manual software update and got to use the dip switch reset to reflash it using the ROM.
I wish it had more ethernet ports but I've managed to live with that. I'd be up for buying an OpenWrt Two as a backup or to replace this if it has even one more LAN jack.
There is definitely beauty in having a separate router device that chugs on just fine regardless what happens to the rest of your network. But I got bored with the constantly-churning embedded culture, bespoke OS's (sorry, OpenWRT), and VPNs generally want more CPU than what purpose-built "routers" have. So I just went back to the old way of using a plain Linux machine as the gateway (now virtualized, with NixOS and nftables) and couldn't be happier. WiFi AP is done by that same physical machine (not virtualized) and by two other amd64 machines that double as Kodi boxes. When you learn netfilter/iproute2, that experience carries to anything else you might switch to.
Does it have hardware PPPoE offloading? Because it's a huge issue for those of us stuck with old-school telecoms for our fibre connections. Doing PPPoE at gigabit speeds needs something that can handle it.
Yes. Mediatek SoCs have hardware acceleration support for that.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/et...
Have you looked at the BPI-R4? It's a pricier option than the OpenWRT One, but it has excellent hw acceleration for networking tasks. I am 90% sure I recall someone reporting using it for a 2.5Gbps PPPoE connection and it handled it. It's also supported by the OpenMPTCProuter project if you need network aggregation support.
While they're okay on paper, they managed to burn a lot of customers in regards to the add-on wifi 7 module.
Quite a few of the modules went out without their eeprom programmed correctly, and all of them appear to be plagued by quite mediocre performance from (alleged) inadequate RF shielding on the card.
It looks like they've revised the design, but it's peeved off quite a few of the Banana Pi/Sinovoip customers who have bought them with the intention of using it as a router/ap with their R4. (It's dual-PCIe fingers with unique spacing and requires out of spec PCIe voltages, so it's only practically usable with a BPi R4.)
At the very least, the customers using them as wired-only routers are likely to be having a slightly better experience.
OpenWRT is amazing. Other than the usual security stuff one of the most overlooked use cases was scheduling other devices. Router is always on and with eatherwake it can orchestrate turning on other networked devices. I also run rtl sdr to capture local weather reports. OpenWRT is used as base for a surprising amount of edge devices.
I'd love to see more OpenWRT hardware that was capable of 2x2.5, 2x5 or 2x10gbit without any wifi, preferably in a case that can be rackmounted without too much trouble (so keeping it under 1U height). I'm currently running a stack of Zyxel T5600's, which are quite capable arm64 openwrt boxes. Those in a rackmount but with sodimm support or in 8+GB ram versions (and some sata/nvme storage, USB3) would be amazing.
you can install openwrt on basically any x86 mini-pc, works fine
I know, and I have, however, I would prefer a ultra-low-power arm-based platform.
Some previous discussion around the launch in 2024:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285689
I have similar board, from same producer - BananaPi BPI-R3 Mini.
Got cheaper version without case - designed simple box with cutouts and 3d printed it out.
I can say it works flawlessly. I'm very happy about it. Previously I was using openwrt on different consumer-grade routers and I always had some issues, even when selecting supported devices.
I'd like something bigger than 1gb for the LAN port...yeah, most of my stuff is quick from a wifi standpoint, but I don't want the hardwired stuff to be second class citizens.
Looking at one of these when TP-link stops patching my Wifi. https://www.toptonpc.com/product/2x10g-sfp-solid-firewall-mi....
I became interested in OpenWrt when I noticed that the cloud portal for my ISP reported to me the names and types of devices that were associated to my home access point/router.
Suddenly I want to put every IPS device into dumb bridge mode, and run my own damn router.
I have a Cisco MR18 router that bridges my LAN to my remote NAS. It would have become e-waste if not for OpenWrt.
When I was visiting my mom a few years back in my hometown, I converted her cheap plastic Xiaomi Mi router into an ordinary router using the OpenWRTInvasion exploit. That router then bridged a remote SIP phone to the main LAN, which was connected to the internet through another plastic router that had also been turned into an ordinary router, again thanks to OpenWrt.
That project is fantastic, and the people behind it are doing great work. Can't recommend them highly enough.
Bpi does a nice job on open source hardware and openwrt integration, but only 2 ports in this model is really good?
Just update my bpi-r3 purchased years ago from 24.x to 25.12, it need a bit of extra work because the sfp interface is renamed(though I never used that), and i finally just do plain sysupgrade only and add some required packages because i run a customized fd.io vpp build on the bpi-r3, connected via vhost-net backed tuntap, it works well, I never regret bought this machine, with current agent stuffs, i think bpi r3 model may be more fun to play with
Been using Openwrt for years, router and access points. Any new AP I buy has to has to be supported by Openwrt. I have probably bought 7 or 8 old AP's at yard sales over the years for $5/$10 and turned them into decent wifi access points back to an Openwrt router running vlans, bandwidth monitoring, QoS, tcpdump for ssh dump with wireshark.
Just excellent, some pretty smart people in the Openwrt forum as well if you have problems.
If you're remotely interested in this stuff you should go ahead and set all this up yourself on a debian or such. Great learning experience.
I started down my “custom” home network journey with OpenWrt and some aftermarket hardware routers. Enjoyed my time using / playing with it.
After some time though, I eventually moved over to using OpenBSD directly. My small brain has a much better understanding of all the moving parts compared to that of OpenWrt :P
It is any better than other open-source and well established Turris Omnia NG ?
It costs about a fifth as much as I just found out.
Turris also specifies 'based on' OpenWRT, rather than straight OpenWRT. In reality there may not be much of a difference, until if/when Turris no longer exists.
the single 2.5gb port kills me. you may as well just have 2 gigabit ports at that point. and don't tell me the wifi is the selling point either, you won't get much more than a gig off 6e.
is there any decent management software for a whole network of these yet? That's what keeps me going back to unifi with opnsense as the router. Last I checked it was basically openwisp, which was hugely painful/complicated to get working when I last looked a few years ago. I would love nothing more than to have a viable option to start replacing the unifi stuff (even better if there is also 10gb switching but that feels like an absolute pipedream still without a large budget for datacenter gear)
How open are the wifi drivers? (it was an issue with Broadcom and WRT54G)
I’ve been running one for a while and love it. Have also built a Nix -> OpenWRT config language transpiler so that I can keep my router state in Nix files and have nice deterministic rollbacks etc. It’s been great!
I'd be interested in any more info you can provide. Do you have your router configs in flakes? I'm currently testing Nix in a proxmox VM.
I just finished writing a shell script to dump all the UCI config files to one text file using curly braces to bracket/separate each file with the intent of committing this to a repo. Then will be writing a little parser to chunk up the text file to the appropriate /etc/config structure that OpenWRT expects. So at any point I can then just checkout different git branches, run the parser, and bam the entire config has been written to the router over ssh.
Still trying to figure out if OpenWRT has some other state outside of the /etc/config directory.
Flashed my TP-LINK router last week with openwrt bin file, to get wifi to ethernet bridge. Working awesome.
There are too many settings. Feels like Gimp (vs paintbrush). But once figured out, it works well.
Ask AI to generate you a UCI config for "<your use case here>".
Reading the raw config files in /etc/config is the opposite of the web UI. The config files are the bare minimum data. Very easy to read.
I have no idea of the wider scope of possibilities that could be written into the config files, but that's where the AI helps.
I purchased one of these for a family member and it has been great.
https://wrtnova.com/builder/ this builder is cool too!
Did anyone, ever do a security evaluation of the most common network chips on the market? How much would it cost, are there even companies doing this?
I have one of these for a few months now. Works like a champ. Firmware updates are very easy now through the web interface.
i don't understand the use case for 1x2.5gbs + 1x1gbs for a router. Why not both 2.5gbs it's not like you'll be running lots of stuff on the router itself so it would be more useful to have a wan AND a lan at 2.5 (outside of load balancing for a lot of wifi devices of course)
I once tried to flash OpenWRT onto a very old router that was EOL, and apparently wherever I had downloaded the firmware it was pre-pwned. There was literally an interface numbered “eth666” and the CLI was playing crazy mind games with me as I tried to configure it.
So I thoroughly destroyed the router and e-wasted it. I honestly never want an open-source router OS ever again.
What does it take to add support for a router? Support for tp-link ax5400 seems missing for a long time.
Are these for sale in the US?
What I want is a cheap, brainless wifi 6 or 7 device, that's easy to mesh and extend. I currently have Orbis that are Wifi-5, and I'm sick of the general untrustworthiness. The thing is, like my WRT54G from back in the day, they just work in all situations. It's amazing how stable this kit has been for 7 years.
I'm not in the US. I can't Amazon. I don't want to spend the equivalent of 1k USD just to get 3 devices in a brainless mesh that covers my ~125sqm place made of insane amounts of radio blocking concrete.
I no longer want to maintain my network, to have network. I want things that just work. The Orbi did that for me - but the costing makes me think abut the future, and not finding a painless solution. I guess that's the tradeoff.
To wit, I also want the mesh comms on another channel (i.e 6Ghz, rather then the 2.4/5.0) and the computers/IOTs/etc isolated from that. Perhaps cheap tri-band is insanely wishful thinking. It sure seems that way.
WRT54G was so good
once i put my on linux on there, will the NICS still operate at maximum speed?
Frankly I just want https://openelab.io/a/s/products/banana-pi-bpi-r4-pro-1 to work with OpenWRT.
The board linked to in the post doesn't have 10 G LAN, only 10 G WAN unlink. So what do people who have a 10 G internet connection do?
Next step: open source hardware ASIC for the open router ?
An open hardware network-focused ASIC would be cool, but cost and long development times would likely be limiting factors. If you wanted to explore this further, starting with FPGA-based router components would be a good starting point. For example:
https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi
Thanks :) Yeah, the router is defiantly further in the future to, as it additionally requires CPU integration for run the software stack, switches are the first order of business.
Can I do a "hold my beer" moment ? https://github.com/Essenceia/ethernet_switch_asic
That's cool, it's obviously not meant to compete with modern router ASICs but it's an impressive achievement for a hobbyist.
Where do you buy the open wrt one? EU
I have an ASUS RT-AX53U running OpenWRT for a few years now.
I bought it, turned it on and flashed it out of the box lmao
I like the idea of having their own hardware but it is not easy to get, so buying normal ones and flashing them still the best option.
I too use ASUS RT-AX53U. Decent hardware. But stock firmware was terribly slow. IPv6 didn't even work.
I heard OpenWrt when I searched how to fix the stock firmware. Flashed it and never turned back. Now, OpenWrt is a critical infra in my house for adblocking, DoH, Firewall, Network Segmentation etc. None of these are possible with the stock firmware.
I'm sorry but lack of 802.11be tri band is a non starter in mid 2026 for this price. Someone else commenting in this thread has linked the glinet 802.11be unit which looks like a better option.
I would also highly encourage people to buy a wired only router, and something like a ubiquiti u7 lite or u7 pro AP, and separate the functions of router and AP.
The ubiquiti unifi controller package is really straightforward to install for basic SOHO use on a base Debian stable system.
My home setup is pretty much as per your description, but for someone like my parents, this does it all in a single device that uses far less power.
I've recently been setting up a GL.iNet Marble for my folks, with Adguard and some other filtering / security add-ons. This is a bit more expensive, but also more future proof.
A U7-Lite uses less than 14W so even in a month it's not much power, cost wise, even if your power is $0.40 a kWh...
> Note that recent (2025-10) batches of the OpenWrt One have an M.2 slot with a detached post at the 2230 position and the shipped product contains no way to attach the post.
The implications of this are going over my head (and TFA should explain it better). I gather that 2230 is a form factor 22x30mm and there's also a 2280 M.2 SSD form factor.
Is this just saying that there's a missing mounting post? So it wobbles? You can't use a certain form factor?
Sounds like you might need to screw your own mounting post in at the 30mm mark.
I'm trying hard but to take offence.
gl·iNet also runs openWRT. You can even ssh into these routers.
1x 2.5g WAN
where to buy?
Increíble
madwifi lives on...
"It's not a router, it's a very naughty board"
nice
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> This thing has no practical purpose.
This is wrong. OpenWRT is fostering several manufacturers that are using OpenWRT as the factory platform for their products. This is a reference design (one of several, this particular one from 2024 is now dated and newer designs are available,) provided by OpenWRT, and they've thoughtfully made it available to anyone that might want one: you can just go buy some with no NDA bullshit and get your developers moving in your lab or doing UI development or whatever. The not-cost-optimized PCB is what you want for this, in addition to the ample RAM+Flash. The "useless" POE is another aspect of this: access points use POE ubiquitously, which is a key OpenWRT use case.
This sources PoE using a third-party daughter board which is mechanically way too big to package into any production access point. So no, that part of a reference design would never be used.
> get your developers moving in your lab or doing UI development or whatever
This is what the industry has been clamoring for among a sea of existing hardware: More garbage UIs glued atop of copy-pasted forgotten hardware.
I am an engineering manager. My job is to poke holes in money-burning projects.
> I am an engineering manager.
Strange. A good engineering manager would see that "way too big" PoE daughter board design as exactly what one would want in a reference design that will be used to test and integrate your preferred PoE solution. Power product life cycles are so short and availability problems so frequent that a good engineering manager knows that their engineers will be reworking power solutions with some regularity.
A good engineering manager would also know that UI development for commercial products is not optional. The engineering manager will expect that marketing will want branding at the very least, that differentiating features will need to be surfaced, etc., and that all of this will need to be integrated into build, test and the package system, and QA'd on real hardware. Basic stuff for an engineering manager.
There are no cheap commodity routers that can run OpenWrt, have modern Wi-Fi features, and are reasonably available (in the sense that you could buy one if your router fails).
OpenWrt is vastly superior to the proprietary software in commodity routers. Proprietary software gates software features behind more expensive models, even though the cheap hardware can handle them.
You also get software updates. Your hardware doesn't become a paperweight when the manufacturer refuses to fix a known, actively exploited vulnerability.
You'll get new features, for free.
> You're not attaching this monstrosity to the ceiling. I would hide it, but whatever.
The enclosure is open source as well. You can build/print your own enclosure if you'd prefer, or get any enclosure for the Banana Pi BPI-R4.
They can't just ship a board without an enclosure, because it won't pass certifications.
For a around two years there, the dynalink dl-wrx36 was selling between $50 & $85 for comparable/better hardware. Still running a pair with an nss-enabled fork. Still effortlessly maxes out a gigabit fiber line with qosify.
Configured it so the 2.5gbe port connects towards the lan where a cheap wifi 7 AP can broadcast the additional signal if anything feel like it needs it. But practically speaking nothing does.
While the openwrt one was a decent experiment, it was far from the only hardware in the price range that had stellar openwrt support before/after it came out. And one thing people seem to forget about with a lot of options (like banana pi options) is that the range & falloff can be terrible. The openwrt two is apparently delayed & going with a different manufacturer.
Openwrt is great if you are willing to customize the software especially. The fact that it can be used as an actual wifi client in a pinch is also a lifesaver.
Long-long term availability is a different problem, but different manufacturers move on.
> Dynalink DL-WRX36
Not available outside the US :(
> Long-long term availability is a different problem, but different manufacturers move on.
Open hardware solves this. You've been able to buy the OpenWrt One from China and ship it anywhere in the world for a reasonable price, every single day since it was released, even when there were better options available. If no one's selling, there are factories willing to make very tiny batches.
Open hardware is nice. I love that you can take a commodity router and claw back some control, but why not start with that control in the first place?
But you can already do that with existing hardware that is 4x capable at the same price point, and runs OpenWRT.
A reference platform makes no sense for OpenWRT as by its nature it runs on dozens upon dozens of different hardware, all which are different and must be tested independently.
It will take time to build up to a point where it's competitive on paper, it's insane that you're comparing a first-gen product from a rag-tag crew to the hardware produced by behemoths that have thousands of engineers and billions of dollars to play with.
Where my use cases don't permit it I won't use this, but if it fits I would rather buy an open-hardware device at ~10x the price of an equivalent proprietary device not out of charity but because that is how much more value it provides to me at equivalent hardware performance.
Which hardware is 4x capable at the same price point and runs OpenWRT?
The government wants ban the "cheap commodity hardware" you speak of because they're having a hard time putting backdoors into routers that are already pwned by the Chinese: https://www.fcc.gov/faqs-recent-updates-fcc-covered-list-reg...
We'll have to make our own hardware. The value of open-source hardware is not limited to repairability. We want the entire digital communication hardware + software stack to be transparent and fully reproducible. These open-source efforts will eventually include the ASIC designs, and designs for the fab production line that makes the ASICs.
> Inexplicably can be powered via PoE, makes no sense if its purpose is to hang off your ISP's gateway
No, this is supposed to replace the ISP-provided junk entirely. It will save you money and close a nasty backdoor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069).
I think the purpose is to have a simple to hack on reference platform for developers. The problem with commodity hardware is the super short lifecycles (many of them stop selling before theres an OpenWRT port), they are locked down and the manufacturers will frequently make tons of internal revisions.
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Yes, POE with helps that. You don't need to plug in the power cable. Commenting "This reeks of LLM-generated content." is not helpful in general.
A desktop computer does not source PoE power. Do you even understand what PoE is or how it works? It's a false statement and a pattern commonly found in LLM slop answers.
> A desktop computer does not source POE power.
Well, mine does. Look for PCIe, PoE+/PSE cards.
Gigabit / 2.5 Gbit connectivity is already obsolete. Any modern product must have 10gbe WAN with the hardware to back up NAT at that throughput.
200 horsepower vehicles are also obsolete. Any modern car should have 500 horsepower with the braking and safety systems to back it up.
That's such an assumption of needs. For someone to be using a 10g capable NAT would be some sort of super nerd with such a small portion of the population. More and more households have no compute device other than their devices. With WiFi routers now being sold with OpenWRT installed, it no longer means you're in the nerd category for installing it.
It's not obsolete, it's basically the contemporary baseline. Remember, this is a cheap device. And unlike most Chinese garbage, you can be reasonably certain that it isn't backdoored.
For a home network 2.5 is plenty.
https://frontier.com/shop/internet/fiber-internet/7-gig
7gig WAN is widely available residentially at a reasonable cost.
it most certainly is NOT available at a reasonable cost in many places.
Not according to Verizon's Internet Security Policy.
Not for a cheapish device that is suitable for my parents that I'd be happy to administer.
No need for a Tundra when an electric scooter does the job.