They are working on an OpenWRT Two at the moment which will be Wifi 7.
OpenWRT runs on a lot of hardware and its a great way to extend the life of a router past the manufacturers patches as well as gain a lot of capabilities. I wouldn't buy a commercial router that wasn't supported by OpenWRT now.
Why do they always have to look like some unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider? What happened to a plain unassuming looking piece of industrial hardware...
Wifi 5-7 happened, now operating at 3 different frequency ranges (2.4, 5 and 6Ghz) and using techniques like beam forming and MIMO. All those antennas need to go somewhere.
If you want plain unassuming looking hardware get dedicated wifi access points and place them all over the building. There are plenty of those shaped liked big smoke detectors.
If you want single device there are also quite a few trash can shaped home routers.
Don't buy one which looks like that if visuals are important for you. I already told that there are plenty of models which avoids this design and form factor. Do I have to spell out specific manufacturers and models?
Almost none of the Ubiquity stuff looks like that. Xiaomi has plenty of white/gray cylinders or boxes with rounded corners. TP-link has whole Deco series, Asus has ZenWifi series. Majority of MikroTik non rack mounted hardware also targets more neutral design.
You also have to consider who is the target audience for dedicated all in one wifi routers.
Majority of regular people are fine with the WiFi that's builtin the modem provided by their ISP.
Any serious commercial office will have the IT team to setup separate (rack mounted) router/switches and ceiling mounted access points that look like previously mentioned smoke alarms.
People with large enough house to need multiple access points but aren't IT specialists willing to wire up Ethernet everywhere -> various product lines described as mesh routers. Like the trash can shaped TP link Deco series and similar from other manufacturers. If your house is not that big, nothing stops you to buy one of them and ignore the mesh functionality.
That leaves people living in small enough house/apartment to be served by single router/switch/Wifi access point combo but for some reason not being satisfied what the ISP provides and also wanting multiple wired connections. Exclude the IT specialists willing to set up home lab and you are left with gamers (potentially impressed by black spider) and few others who have hopefully have enough rationality to place the router where it's not an eyesore or picking some of the previously mentioned stuff.
Another factor is move from antennas that are simple correctly size wire maybe with some spiral which easily fits in small rounded antenna to flat pcb antennas which encourage more rectangular design of the antenna housing and rest of the router. A lot of it is still partially just for the show, trying to give the impression "this one has more/bigger antennas must be better WiFi", but oversized partially empty plastic antenna housing were a thing even before current spider trend.
White slightly rounded 8 legged spider still looks like spider. Trash cans have a bunch of antennas but they hide them in larger volume. Dedicated access points have the advantage of being placed more predictably (near ceiling with little obstacles), they also have advantage of being distributed less work for each of them instead of single router covering whole house.
You don't have to buy such a design, the ubiquiti u7 lite and u7 pro are ordinary round white ceiling mount 802.11be AP.
Somehow ordinary non tech consumers got it into their heads that something which looks like a f117 with many spiky antennas sticking out of it must be faster.
The U7 Lite only does 2x2 MIMO. Compared to 4x4 MIMO in the U6 LR, the U7 Lite therefore does a much poorer job at beamforming (directing the energy of the signal towards the device).
Personally, I find it better to have multiple low end access points (like the TP-Link Archer C80 which has 3x3 MIMO on 5 GHz) deployed to achieve excellent coverage in a house. Sadly, the U7 line is a bit too expensive for that. Plus, I'm loathe to deal with UniFi deployments now that I am well versed in the glass jaws in the platform.
There really is space in the market for a product line that is basically what UniFi is, but done "right". Ie: can be debugged or you can fix it without an internet connection or recover the system when the owner forgets the password and lost access to the email account used for 2FA. UniFi is an absolute nightmare the moment anything goes even slightly wrong.
I went from Unifi to Ruckus APs and never looked back.
You can find older generations on eBay very inexpensively for what they are, install Ruckus Unleashed firmware on them, and operate them completely locally.
They have the best beamforming antennas in the industry and their firmware is rock solid. I'm on some very old models (2.4ghz and 5ghz only) but they work fantastically well. I'll probably upgrade to some wifi 6 models soon.
But for my uses 500-600mbps rock solid throughout my house is plenty. Anything where I want max throughput/low latency/low jitter (mainly gaming) is hardwired. For wifi I care much more about complete and consistent coverage.
Yes, perhaps they do allow for greater flexibility, but that's complex and difficult to do well/reliably, and doing it well/reliably requires signal analysis gear and software modeling that's out of the reach of normal consumers.
Because the gamers and dads who make all the purchasing decisions about household routers love F-117s, and stealth bombers, and consider fighter jets and black “Nighthawk” branding to be way sexier than a pink box of candy.
A shit ton of beam forming and phased arrays. Why do you think all of a sudden there's a bunch of "WiFi Radar Imaging" projects popping up on HN? It's not just because of advances in ML. Boost the output power by a few more magnitudes and you can probably ship them to Ukraine.
I am not sure why a simple cylinder shape should be called "trash can shape". It can be favorably compared to many things. How about an R2D2-shaped router?
I bought it in anticipation of the Nintendo DS having WiFi capabilities, which I had never heard of before (I was like 13 or 14 then). Had to convince my parents to get broadband internet too.
Still have one, still works. Would happily use it if it were still practical. I think you can still load OpenWRT on them, but there's no software route around the hardware being outdated and slow.
As a counter opinion to "too slow" in regards to 54Mbps, as it likely depends on your use cases. My WRT54GL was the primary family router until 2018 and even worked just fine for live video broadcasting. Even today it sees good use for video calls with no issues at all. Lovely little piece of hardware that refuses to die. Just a shame that OpenWRT has dropped support since 2013, which feels a bit ironic given their name.
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 was so annoyed that the Linksys cable modem, that came in the exact same color scheme was not stackable with the routers. You had a wifi router and a non wifi router in the same exact case with same exact front panel. But no, the modem was completely different form factor.
I have been extremely happy with cisco 3802 access points purchased on ebay for $25 each. Sure, it's only wifi5, but they're pretty solid and you can just deploy a swarm of them.
And they don't look fugly.
It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.
TBH if I wanted a bunch of closed source 802.11ac (2017 era) AP purchased on eBay, I would go for Unifi stuff far before Cisco. There's a plethora of it available from decommissioned sites.
I didn't look at those; do they support running some controller thing in one of the APs to allow central management of all the nodes?
Cisco's mobility express just runs on one of the APs and can fail over to another of the APs; it's a slick piece of software.
And yes, it isn't open source, which is a real shame since cisco's killed it (as far as I can tell) and it probably represents an enormous and sophisticated investment in effort and engineering and it'll just melt into entropy.
I loath cisco and don't recommend their kit lightly. In this one case, they seem to have accidentally made (for my use case, running 5 APs at home) a perfect product. They're cheap, extremely reliable, my wife doesn't hate them (though mostly they're in the attic or basement; only one is visible), they've got a (relatively) easy to use UI that manages all of them at once, and (Except for the switch 2) they seem to just work even though I've got vlans and lots of SSIDs and other goofy stuff).
If I had a simpler house to support, I'd just get a single WRT capable "big fast" router / AP...
Thanks for the head's up! The Rukus Unleashed looks like the perfect replacement for my icky system.
I'll put in an ebay search notification for when the R650 (and R750) for $50 each and maybe it'll ding in a couple years and I'll be in a place to swap out the 3802 network I've got running now...
I don't know if the one you're talking about is one of these, but in the many years I worked at Cisco they seemed to buy a company every few weeks. Many of them had decent products which Cisco then meticulously destroyed. Luckily there was always kit to preserve for future generations, which I dutifully stacked in my attic.
I'm overall not a fan of Cisco; quite the opposite. There are lots of companies ahead of Cisco in the "pretty not so cool" these days so my ire is not as strong as it was when I was a young idealist.
As far as I can tell, in this one case (with mobility express) it seems like Cisco accidentally did something overall (IMO) "good" for the world by making it possible for their kit to be reused by some part of the world where someone will get utility out of the still very nice equipment and somehow cisco won't see a dime from that "someone is using cisco equipment" event.
Mobility express isn't perfect, but considering the cost of the gear and the cost of the license, it is pretty darned good. I suspect some product manager at cisco got fired for accidentally making the world not quite as bad a place as it could be if cisco extracted license fees on all the 2802, 3802, and 4800 access points or otherwise sent them to the e-waste bin 4 years early.
Unfortunately you need to use the cisco software / firmware. The access points run linux but they're locked down like crazy with signed firmware blobs and such.
That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and all this equipment and software is now totally unsupported by cisco so don't run PCI transactions at home... I'd also avoid running their captive portal or some of their other weird features...
Actually setting it up is a bit of a chore but it is a full featured "enterprise" (cough) AP management system with all the knobs and twiddles you could ask for.
It's really only a good idea if you don't value your time (like me) or if you have a sprawling plaster house where you want to have lots of cheap access points instead of a couple super fast ones.
Lastly, for better or worse, I haven't been able to make my kid's switch 2 work on the network.
Uni has an adapter for USB to Ethernet (if wired is an option) that works with those Nintendo devices, I have one that an extended family member borrowed (unknown if the Switch was a 1 or 2).
Cisco has trained a generation of home-lab would-be cisco engineers to dig through shady russian forums to download sketchball binaries. I think they even hide the checksums of their gated binaries, just to make sure you're never sure how sketchy their code might be.
But in the one specific case of mobility express, you can ... just download it. Unexpected but actually pretty cool.
You still have to figure out installing and configuring it, which is mildly tedious, and you'll probably need one of those cisco serial cables, but it is an exciting side-quest instead of a dirty forum crawl.
To bring it back to "openwrt" -- this nonsense by cisco, broadcom, HP, IBM, etc is why generation after generation the "enterprise" market is dying -- they're excluding 90% of the would-be engineers from the job market protecting their e-waste from secondary or later reuse, likely just on the off-chance they might make a tiny amount of money downstream. But I guess that's not a line-item that shows up in the quarterly reports (what's the value of "community goodwill" ?)
Because a modern wifi router requires a minimum of 6 antennas. 9 is even better.
This lends itself to a spider like design with just a ton of antennas sticking out of a box, or a trash can with the antennas hidden inside around the outside edge.
But usually it is a phased-array setup, or it seems to be, with a row of antennas.
Another setup is circular or semicircular. I suppose it allows for a more uniform directional diagram across the entire 360°, because a straight phased array has harder time emitting sideways.
It is probably a combination of hitting a (low) cost and mimo; cisco makes pretty reasonable looking APs with lots of radios and decent coverage and they look like UFOs not alien spiders.
But it's probably easier / cheaper to get maximum coverage at larger distances from a single AP using a big array of sticking out antennae, and that's what a normal home user is going to want.
I feel like there's an untapped market here. I want them to go with the alien spaceship concept all the way thru; I wanna see mini Death Star mesh nodes, X Wing routers and Millennium Falcon access points, dammit. Or hell, cross the multiverse and give me Borg Cube mesh nodes, complete with green shiny LEDs that actually indiacte network/hardware status.
Because a shocking amount of consumers buy things based purely on how they appear and the gamer adjacent aesthetic looks surprising and advanced to consumers. Unassuming business boxes are much harder to sell via the visual marketing
if your rep depends so much on visual aesthetics then I'd say you don't have much rep to begin with. if someone trusts me they'll buy whatever I say regardless of how it looks, and likewise if I trust somebody to recommend a piece of hardware I know the aesthetics are irrelevant and they know more than I do about the specs compared to the competition.
It's a pretty functional design if you accept that the extruded antennae are necessary. They're really small, like half the footprint of my old Asus 6 antenna beast, and the fixed antennae are so much less fiddly. Finally, fast and one-click adguard home, what's not to like.
Hey, I think this is important, Flint 3 relies on a Qualcomm chipset, so, at least some weeks ago, no vanilla OpenWRT was available for it (Qualcomm kernel).
On the other hand, if you can live with Wifi 6 and only 2x2.5Gbps ports (and 4x1Gbps), Flint 2 is powered with a Mediatek chipset, that runs a 100% vanilla OpenWRT.
Both are 1GB RAM, 8GB emmc little beasts that can even run some docker containers. IMHO Flint2 is in the top 5 for SOHO OpenWRT supported routers
In my opinion, get the Flint 2, the Flint 3 doesn't work with vanilla OpenWRT (but it does work with GL.iNet's OpenWrt fork). Then again, I don't need the 5x2.5G ports or Wifi 7 since my internet only goes to 1G.
I got the Flint 3 because I wanted 6E for my Quest 3. It’s not bad, but still doesn’t reach enough through the walls. What I like about GL.Inet UI is that it’s very easy to set up WireGuard /OpenVPN profiles per MAC, and you can drop into LuCi for more advanced stuff.
It's not Broadcom so it is supportable by OpenWrt. It runs Qualcomm IPQ5332 SoC which recently got supported in upstream linux ath12k drivers... There are a few patches to make it work and the only blocking issue is with the Realtek switch connected to the LAN ports.
I am not a purist on the blob situation, there is no time to chase each one... GL.Inet folks seem to be good people, the product works.
BTW, even though there are mentions that OpenVPN is accelerated on this router, WireGuard is still times faster. I had to switch from ExpressVPN to Proton as ExpressVPN doesn't support WG profiles.
I have really liked my GL.iNet travel router, also with OpenWRT. I didn't think I would need a travel router but they're pretty handy.
I didn't realise routers like theirs existed, and had been paying through the nose for your standard brands like TPLink and hoping it didn't get popped.
Glinet are doing a great job with their routers. I have the Beryl AX which is fully openwrt compatible. The new Beryl 7 is also fully compatible now. Mediatek chips might not be as high performance as Qualcomm but they make up in openness.
Edit:
They just announced Flint 4 with a Mediatek chip:
Gl.Inet ships with their openwrt version. I have the last version and it can be flashed to vanilla openwrt or one a high speed branch. It’s been good and fast. I don’t need wifi 7 yet so I have time.
I run OpenWrt on 2 of my routers. It's really amazing the level of control. Although, I am now building a better approach: a mini PC as a managed linux router replacing my ISP (no wifi). Then my 2 wifi routers for wifi.
That router uses OpenWRT, but only official firmware can be installed. The Asus ZenWifi BT7 is currently widely recommended if you want to go OpenWRT Wifi7.
Source? A cursory check on their website shows a Hong Kong and a US address. Some people seem to be claiming mainline China associations as well, which could be true, can't find anything on that in either direction.
But Israeli, no can't find that. Sure you didn't confuse it with some other company?
It looks like the person you replied to deleted their comment, but I assume it was about GL-iNet being a Chinese company.
They have a tiny Hong Kong office that handles marketing as well as a US office for technical support, but the entirety of engineering and manufacturing is in Shenzhen and Chengdu.
Because they provide a hosted site-to-site VPN service they are obligated to hold a B13 license. One of the conditions of which is the ability for the Chinese government to request access to devices worldwide.
I bought one of their travel routers to play with and even though it's OpenWRT based, I consider it Chinese firmware because they add their own stuff on top of it. The fact that it's even possible that it can be enrolled in their GoodCloud remote access....no thanks. I consider it an untrusted device except when I have stock OpenWRT on it. I know it's paranoia but companies like that marketing to the tech crowd/devs especially now with their KVM's just seems slightly fishy.
That is interesting (and I recommend you flash stock openwrt instead, I did on mine). But no, the parent comment I replied to claimed Israeli / IDF connections.
Why 7 (802.11be) when the bandwidth isn't really used? Genuine question. The GL-BE9300 mentioned here clocks in well within WiFi 5 range even.
I've got 10Gbps fiber at home (egregious, I know), and the only OpenWRT router I found that can saturate it is the Turris Omnia NG[0]. The price tag is a notch up from others but it's legitimately one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever owned. A perf3 test against an in-town server was able to pull 800 Megabytes per second; the router is no joke.
If you have a thick line to your ISP, I highly recommend!
Screw the max theoretical bandwidths for marketing, without 6 GHz (which would need 6E or 7) and the improved airtime efficiency I can barely get a few hundred jittery mbps standing next to my AP because the airspace is so crowded where I live.
>I've got 10Gbps fiber at home (egregious, I know), and the only OpenWRT router I found that can saturate it is the Turris Omnia NG[0]. The price tag is a notch up from others but it's legitimately one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever owned.
Apparently, WiFi is spotty on OPNsense. I did start looking into home grown options, but WiFi 7 with 10Gbit ethernet is no joke. Most hardware ends up being power-hungry and noisy.
The Omnia NG is fanless, meaning quiet and power-efficient. It's also small and relatively stylish. The small hardware LCD is very handy, and everything Just Works. The whole package is just so well put together.
Fanless is attractive on paper, but often means overheating and unreliable in practice. A large, slow fan in a bigger case is always better if you value reliability and a long service life. The best 10G router that you can buy is a low spec PC with a two-port 10G NIC. Make sure airflow is directed to the NIC (a PCI fan bracket is useful for that). WiFi is best handled by a dedicated access point, ideally the ceiling-mounted commercial type.
In my stress tests, I've not seen any issues with overheating. My 10G ONU connects to the router over an ethernet cable, and the SFP+ module that plugs into does get quite warm, though not hot enough to be uncomfortable.
You can run vanilla if you want. Their Turris OS is just a custom distro with some added userspace niceties. One of the coolest is a snapshot system that reduces "unbricking" the device to just a menu click at bootup.
There are even people who have gotten NixOS running on it, apparently.
OpenWrt is a great piece of software(firmware) to prevent ISPs selling your browsing data to the advertisers. Although by now most ISPs are probably doing packet inspection.
It's easy to customize, I have a script to notify me when a new device connects to my router[1] and I also have a script to notify me when someone logins into my router[2].
Earlier I used to connect my openwrt router directly to the ISP's switch but now a days they've started to force their 'AI powered' router which is centrally managed. I now have to usee OpenWrt to defend against the ISP's router first and then the broader public network.
> OpenWrt is a great piece of software(firmware) to prevent ISPs selling your browsing data to the advertisers.
Huh, how? Either ISPs are doing deep packet inspection, and can track your browsing data regardless of what firmware you run, or they don't, and it still doesn't matter what firmware you use on your switches/routers, you ISP still won't be able to see TLS traffic, which most internet traffic is today.
Until there's more wide support for Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), the SNI header in the TLS handshake is always sent in plaintext. Between that an unencrypted DNS, most routers can easily spot/log what you're accessing in a browser.
As some not deep into networking, just home(lab) stuff, learning OpenWRT took some time. But now cannot think of buying a router not for OpenWRT, once I learn what is possible I want to use it.
Fot example from my ISP I can have two options for PPPoE connection, first is legacy IPv4 only but lacks IPv6, second is IPv4 but behind CGNAT and with modern IPv6.
With OpenWRT, I am able to make two PPPoE connection over the same wire and have the best of both worlds.
Combining the WiFi with the router never made sense to me. Routers can last a long time and WiFi gets new versions with new capabilities every few years.
I would rather just connect a separate wireless AP to my switch, preferably also with PoE. And then I can upgrade and expand that as needed while leaving the perfectly fine router alone.
I just bought a house and this was the conclusion I came to. A cheap PoE-capable multigig switch and a single Omada access point cost about the same as a cheap WiFi 7-capable router would have. I did opt to run the Omada Controller software on a Raspberry Pi instead of buying a hardware controller (to save a few bucks); maybe if I had a lot more hardware it'd make sense but for my one AP it's more than capable. So far I'm quite pleased, it gives me the peace-of-mind knowing that WiFi upgrades are effectively plug-and-play - plug in the AP, adopt it in the controller, add it to the site, and the existing network is already being broadcast - no more router reconfiguration every few years!
The other devices based on the same filogic chip do have dual 2.5Gbps at least.
You can get a Wifi 7 device and 2x2.5GBps with Wifi 7 support already with the Asus BT8 and a few other devices. Asus's bootloader firmware flasher will take the initial OpenWRT image so its really quite simple to get going.
How will it handle PPPoE at gigabit speeds? I've been wanting to replace by terrible router from my ISP, but the options that can handle gigabit+ PPPoE are limited.
Very well, IIRC I have measured its capability to route at about 16gbps IIRC although that isn't PPPoE just the usual iperf test, it handles my 1.2gbps without any drama.
I've been hunting for a good switch with at least two 10Gbps ports too, surprisingly hard to find today still. I've ended up with a XGS1250-12 (3 10Gbps ports) for now, but OpenWrt support isn't great, the ports end up 1Gbps (or some other similar problem, not sure I remember the details 100%), so still running Zyxel firmware which, well, isn't OpenWrt... Other people here might have recommendations for suitable switches with good OpenWrt support?
Is there a version of the Banana Pi kit that comes with all of the dozen carefully positioned antennas desirable for a tri-band or quad-band wifi 7 setup?
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.