Which hardware is best supported generally and most likely to be the first one out with working AX in OpenWrt? I know various progress has been made but I really like the R7800 AC router since it's so easy to work with from a user perspective, any AX device like that might get support in the near future?
OK, for some reason they're not available here at all... (yet)
There are quite many Netgear routers tho' and some Asus and TP-Link too.
Yeah, for some reason the Linksys E8450 router is not yet available in Europe. (UK version seems to be there, but it likely has the wrong power plug)
The router looks interesting, although the absence of wifi antennas likely decreases the wifi range.
Yes, but while the AX3600 is still rather experimental the E8450 got merged a while ago (albeit past the 21.02 branching so it is only available in snapshots so far).
BTW: I do actually have both of them running in my lab quite nicely.
1 Like
Quick search from the TOH entry:
https://forum.openwrt.org/search?q=RT3200
If I read it correct no 11ax support for now and some hundreds of messages about this Mediatek device.
Compared to thousands of messages and active development about Xiaomi AX3600.
To me it seems the OpenWrt ecosystem about QCA 11ax is a lot more promising.
Promising how?
Thousands of messages because the 3 people working on it like to chat regularly and bounce ideas off each other.
Hundreds of messages about the other because the support has been done outside the public stage of the forum.
Not really a valid metric for measuring either one.
11ax does work on rt3200/e8450. It is just not supported by LUCI (yet...).
4 Likes
You got it actually wrong. E8450/RT3200 is much more ready, while AX3600 is still under development / reverse engineering.
the basic 802.11ax support in OpenWrt (including LuCI GUI) is still under development, so none of the routers has full AX support in GUI, yet.
2 Likes
promising for a 11ax successor to 11ac ath10k devices like wave 1 TP-Link Archer C7 v2, wave 2 Netgear R7800.
The ecosystem consisting of the number of users with tweaking and development activity is important for the future device support.
Thank you. Both routers are available in the EU, 111 Euro for Xiaomi AX3600 and 150 Euro for Belkin RT3200.
You can get the AX3600 for much less than 100 EUR, they regularly pop up for around 60 EUR.
3 Likes
Really? A non-UK version for EU?
Where? can you provide a link? (So far I have only found the UK version, which I suspect to have the wrong power plugin)
It’s not in stock in the EU sellers at this time: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B08L4PJKKB
the green in stock marking from the price comparison service is not up to date.
Amazon UK says it has one unit in stock.
In the offer:
RT3200-UK
It’s the UK version sold in the EU.
Yeah, I guess all here including me got their E8450 units off eBay.
1 Like
The xiaomi AX6 is like £35-40 and is ipq8071a based and runs of basically the same image as the AX3600 (bar some WiFi changes).
But again the ipq807x stuff is very experimental and getting it into OpenWRT mainline will take some time
Edit, prices are up slightly but ...
Hagglezon lists Belkin RT3200 on amazon.co.uk for 79gbp (about 92eur) but because UK is outside of EU, getting it to Germany or Ireland or anywhere else would probably incur some cost. amazon.de and others have it for around 150. Linksys E8450 seems non-existent in Europe (if you find it, let me know and post a link).
Since this is in snapshot, does one need to build it manually? Or is that only in the case where we know OpenWRT will live on the device permanently?
You don't need to build anything manually, you can just download it and install through the web interface. But the snapshot means that it doesn't come with LuCi (web interface), though you can install it manually with 2 commands and is updated very quickly, which means that the packages in the OpenWRT repository get outdates very quickly (e.g. if you didn't install openvpn or whatever the day you've installed the snapshot and decide to do that in a week, it will get outdated and you'll have to update to the new snapshot). It is also somewhat experimental, and I'd suppose that things might break with nobody noticing. But apart from that, if you can figure out how to connect to the router via ssh and set up your internet connection without the web GUI (but after that it's one command away and you can use it the same way you would use a release) and if you just want to set everything up and never touch it again, there shouldn't be problems with using the snapshot.
But of course you can also build it for yourself (the same way you can build a release image) if you want to.
AX3600 image does have to be built manually though as it was only made working several days ago and is not yet ready to be officially supported by OpenWrt in any form (not even snapshot). I would wait for it to get supported by snapshot images at the very least (though I would guesstimate that taking weeks at the very best) before using it for more than testing. RT3200 is already mostly/fully supported (apart from LuCi not yet having support for WiFi ax and similar small things) and can be used as a main router with no much problem.
3 Likes