This thing has no practical purpose. The whole point of OpenWRT is to run it on cheap commodity hardware. This ticks none of those boxes.
It has two Ethernet ports, no switch. WHY?
Inexplicably can be powered via PoE, makes no sense if its purpose is to hang off your ISP's gateway (which almost certainly lacks PoE supply). PoE feature will never be used. You're not attaching this monstrosity to the ceiling.
It's utterly gigantic due to inefficient PCB layout.
Why is right to repair important for a throwaway router? Given what will usually fail are the hard to source ASICs.
There is so much better hardware out there manufactured in volume for cheaper.
It was likely a fun engineering project for someone but the business case isn't there.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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 things 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
1gb ram is very good for a router. Most have 128-512MB. Good MVP where people might want to roll their own code without spending time on discovery/return/rebuy to find a vendor supplied box that will let you get some storage open & git wired in. POE lets you plug it straight to a desktop computer, ssh in, and get to work.
Will be interesting to see if this or similar projects evolve to support cellular/lora (existing open-source linux code/support may be the barrier here).
Suspect this is the right form factor for something open that will see some hobby/prototyping use.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
As a counter opinion to "too slow" as it likely depends on your use cases. My WRT54GL was the primary family router until 2018 and even worked just fine for video live streaming. Even today it sees good use for video calls with no issues at all. Lovely little piece of hardware that just refuses to die. Just a shame that OpenWRT has dropped support since 2013, which feels a bit ironic given their name.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 routers (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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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" ?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
>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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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]
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> You also said that Linux has much better performance vs BSD
Anecdotal, but I've never managed to get FreeBSD to reach 10 Gbps.
Attempted over the years using TrueNAS CORE (file sharing) or OpnSense (routing). Tested NICs have been Mellanox and Intel. Across two different machines, one being a Dell PowerEdge R720.
I'm sure some full-time sysadmin knows some secret performance tweak but nothing in the first 2 pages of Google managed to solve it.
Switched the file server over to TrueNAS SCALE, full speed. Switched the router over to OpenWrt, full speed.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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 run OpenWRT off PoE, which i have coming in on the LAN port).
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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)
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).
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.
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.
"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.
>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.
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
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadIt has two Ethernet ports, no switch. WHY?
Inexplicably can be powered via PoE, makes no sense if its purpose is to hang off your ISP's gateway (which almost certainly lacks PoE supply). PoE feature will never be used. You're not attaching this monstrosity to the ceiling.
It's utterly gigantic due to inefficient PCB layout.
Why is right to repair important for a throwaway router? Given what will usually fail are the hard to source ASICs.
There is so much better hardware out there manufactured in volume for cheaper.
It was likely a fun engineering project for someone but the business case isn't there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
I would love to be able to whitelist which devices are allowed to access the internet during night time hours.
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.
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.
It'd be handy for me: The fastest WAN pipe I 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 things 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
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.
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.
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?
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. :)
Motorbike analogy, it's like comparing a RS125 with a Tmax/Burgman maxiscooter...
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.
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.
Been using OpnSense for about 8 years now though... it's just been the best option for me, I use separate commercial AP.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285689
Will be interesting to see if this or similar projects evolve to support cellular/lora (existing open-source linux code/support may be the barrier here).
Suspect this is the right form factor for something open that will see some hobby/prototyping use.
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.
https://www.turris.com/en/products/omnia-NG-wired/
Why choose this over the https://openelab.io/a/s/products/banana-pi-bpi-r4-pro-1 ?
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.
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
I have two old Amplifi HD units in wireless backhaul mesh that I’d like to upgrade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 have a U7 Lite and it is very directional compared to other routers I have used (spider style, trash can style, etc.)
Personally, I find it better to have multiple low end routers (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.
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.
As for why it needs multiple antennas, it's for MIMO and beam forming.
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?
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.
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...
I guess they think consumers need them to look like this crap.
And they don't look fugly.
It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.
You have any docs on how to set these up? I believe a firmware change is required.
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).
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" ?)
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...
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...
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.
[1]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/967954/beamforming-expl...
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.
I love the phrasing, we usually cal this design as transformers mating.
I got the Flint 2 to avoid that, and I'm really happy with it for the reasons you mentioned.
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.
But Israeli, no can't find that. Sure you didn't confuse it with some other 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.
https://www.gl-inet.com/en-us/pages/about-us
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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/
I mean is it supported by vanilla OpenWRT image?
I do like the board though.
There are even people who have gotten NixOS running on it, apparently.
Why not use OPNsense on a mini PC?
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.
My friend used to complain about UHF interference because he lived so close to the approach glidepath.
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.
OpenWRT is very good, but the installation and upgrades are not easy. There are a zoo of images for different hardware and installation options.
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.
...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.)
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.
The solution is to use image-builder and bake your config into the image.
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...>
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 .
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've never managed to get FreeBSD to reach 10 Gbps.
Attempted over the years using TrueNAS CORE (file sharing) or OpnSense (routing). Tested NICs have been Mellanox and Intel. Across two different machines, one being a Dell PowerEdge R720.
I'm sure some full-time sysadmin knows some secret performance tweak but nothing in the first 2 pages of Google managed to solve it.
Switched the file server over to TrueNAS SCALE, full speed. Switched the router over to OpenWrt, full speed.
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?
I imagine that using an ASIC is way more cost efficient vs using a CPU.
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.
No need for a Tundra when an electric scooter does the job.
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.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/et...
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.
https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi
https://www.wiisfi.com/
The single best wifi reference I've found to date.
This answers so many questions that I had but never had the true desire to research every niche WiFi term.
Suddenly I want to put every IPS device into dumb bridge mode, and run my own damn router.
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 :-)
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.
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).
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.
So that's 10 kWh/mo for the PC vs 4 kWh/mo for the OpenWrt One.
Spending hundreds on new hw to save $20 a year in power cost.
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.
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.
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