Hey guys,
I was relying on a Linksys WRT3200ACM with Openwrt as router/ap for my house. Wifi was really bad and I just sold it. Now I am searching for a way to better use this new speed for my home lab. I plan to use OpenWRT for an AP with the best speed I can find and known good compatibility with OpenWRT. What are the best performances with good open firmware we can find today on Europe (many US or other country models are not available on Europe)?
For a router, I am thinking of having a dedicated one with OpnSense.. also accept suggestions on hardware.
Perhaps some router like TP-Link be850 will be good enough but this need the hw nat to deal with this level od speed. When count *sense then put newer hw like mellanox cx4 combined with high speed CPU like xeon e3 V6 or some i3 12gen . Maybe atom c3758 with Intel qat will be good for this. Depend mostly on type od traffic You make.
@ed8 I checked both APs, they have 1G ethernet port, so it would be a bottleneck for my speed right? Isn't there maybe an AP with 2.5G port accepted on OpenWRT? Also would be nice to have 6Ghz, I know it is currently not supported but I expect in 1-2 years it will be.
@m10 did not find be850, is it be85 what you mean? anyway I did not find "be" models that support OpenWRT for AP use. this is a suggestion for OpnSense router right? I was not completely sure.
depending on your access type, i.e. delivery protocol, there are huge difference in terms of processing power requirements. e.g. pppoe may used by your ISP and various implementations of pppoe stack differently scales. see next point.
opnsense as i know still based on FreeBSD (if not please ignore), and pppoe in particular is not scaling well in FreeBSD as it is a single threaded app. or at least was the last time i used.
to route 4Gbps up/down you need a massive hardware. a plastic router will not fit for sure. even a x86 will sweat because they miss the special network chipset from enterprise grade real routers. real routers are expensive not just because vendors go for profit.
unless you are up to something not typical home usage I cannot imagine how 4Gbps can be utilized by a household in reality.
delivering 4Gbps also a challenge from port type point of view so there might be an ISP marketing BS involved here. my ISP sell too 2Gbps ... on paper but in practice it is a 2 x 1Gbps connection. so for 4Gbps you would need a 10G nic to receive ISP connection then either you distribute it via 1G switch or need to invest in 10G switch and 10G client nics ... very-very expensive but it is your pocket. in former case your clients will receive max 1Gbps anyhow. (note: there is 2,5G and 5G but as i see they even less available then 10G).
having X bw from ISP is basically covering speed of the wire but does not say / guarantee anything about ISP to Internet speed or speed between you and your selected service provider (i.e. Steam/Netflix/etc download will not be quicker as there is speed limit on their side, and through all the way involving many other parties from them to you). so should not expect that suddenly "internet" will be also 4Gbps up/down for you.
in short: if you can afford, sure go ahead and buy all things on 10G and set your expectation upfront.
The OpenWrt 23.05.0 release notes say it supports both 2.5GbE and WiFi 6E on the following two devices: Acer Predator W6 (MT7986A) and ZyXEL EX5700 (MT7986).
To be clear, I have no experience with either of those devices.
OpenWrt supported access points with 6Ghz are not yet available to my knowledge - I expect that eventually Filogic 860 / 880 devices will pop up but that may take some time.
ps: for a 'Wifi-Router' Banana Pi BPI-R4 (Filogic 880 based) is close in getting supported
@grrr2 thanks for all the points, and yes I read this thread and understand a bit how crazy I am to try to use 4Gbps. actually, I don't have real demand on my home servers for 4Gbps yet. I would say 1Gbps is even good enough for now. for me 2.5Gbps would be a good compromise also in terms of money for hardware and future-proof.
for router, I am really thinking of building some custom home router with more memory mostly to try out deep packet inspection and study a bit of enterprise networking features.
but I am mostly worried about having the best possible AP that OpenWRT supports in terms of performance, since I know the focus of OpenWRT is more on long life support for older hardware and that means mostly not supporting latest shiny APs on the market. than I would like to invest here to get the shiniest, with best performance to be more future proof (I rely a lot also on wifi speed since some of my devices that needs speed are difficult to reach by cable), and also because of my bad experience with Linksys WRT3200ACM.
As I said, the 23.05.0 release notes say it supports WiFi 6E (and also 2.5GbE) on two devices. The only difference between the WiFi 6 standard and the WiFi 6E standard is that 6E added support for 6 GHz.
x86_64 systems and switches are readily available with 2.5GBASE-T support, 5GBASE-T is basically non-existent - so if you want to exceed 2.5 GBit/s, you'll (in practice) have to look at 10GBASE-T (newer chipsets/ cards support 1000BASE-T, 2.5GBASE-T, 5GBASE-T and 10GBASE-T, older ones might only cover 1000BASE-T and 10GBASE-T).
For such high speeds I would consider using a master router and a couple Access points. There are several vendors that offer such a thing (Cisco, Huawei, Ubiquiti, Allied thelesyn, etc), but the best price/performance probably goes to Mikrotik.
Get one 10GBps router (RB3011UiAS-RM or 4011iGS-RN will do) for a fibre and as cAPmanager, with two hAPax as controlled APs, place them strategicaly in home to get best possible coverage and you are set for years. If you need more Access points in the future, they are easily added to the network.
Mikrotik 4011 is what I have, it might sweat doing nat for 4gbps, but I think it would do it. A lot of devices are going to fall flat on pppoe connections though as most of them have a single threaded stack. Ccr2004 would be my first choice if I had a 4gbps connection available.
Where did you find that the 3011 can do 10G?? There is no 10G port on this model??
While 4011 has only a single 10G port which is also not quite making sense if you want a single client to enjoy more than 1G (the 5009 is about the same, however 10G + 2.5G port together at least this allows you to use 2.5G internet)
And that's the reason why I didn't go for Mikrotik eventually, probably the one sold in Japan Amazon (Buffalo WXR-5950AX12/WXR-6000AX12) best fit for common 10G application, outside Japan you can still get QNAP 301W (just weaker in WiFi, same platform) for dual 10G (unfortunately no SFP+)