Advice / Recommendation for router for 300Mbps Internet connection

Hi,

For the last 6 years I've been running OpenWRT on a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND v2 and I think that it's time to look for a new router. I have been reading a lot of posts in this forum to try to figure out what kind of router buy and obviously it depends a lot of what your requirements/needs are. So here I am looking for advice.

Current network setup:

  • 120 Mbps of connection (maybe I will upgrade to 300 Mbps in near future.)
  • All important network clients are wired
  • Many IOT devices
  • Mobile phones, tablet, laptop
  • OpenWRT running: SQM, OpenVPN (just to have access to my home from outside), uPnP, DynDNS, DNS over TLS.

I would like to have dual band, since my neighbourhood is saturated in 2.4 Ghz band. I'm also thinking having a main router and a dumb AP since there are zones in my home that the signal is quite bad. I don't need an extremely powerful gaming router. I'm looking for affordable one that could have more cpu / ram that my current router. Also want gigabit lan ethernet.

I was reading that a good choice could be Archer C7 since it's quite well supported by OpenWRT but I have doubts about the different cpus. Main doubt it's about single core vs dual core.

What is supposed to be better in terms of cpu ? For example Archer C7 Single core VS MT7621 Dual Core router.

Today I got a Xiaomi Mi Router 3g that looks great in terms of cpu / ram / rom but I need more lan ports rather the two that it has. Maybe It could be a candidate to be the dump AP. So I still need to look for the main router.

Thanks in advance.

The archer c7 is a great choice for now, but if you upgrade to 300 it won't do SQM at speed anymore. See Comparative Throughput Testing Including NAT, SQM, WireGuard, and OpenVPN for benchmarks on various router chips. If you have dead zones do straight for another router to use as an AP. Maybe get a C7 today and when you upgrade to 300 start to use it as a AP and get a more powerful router at that time?

It sounds like your main router will need to be an r7800 or wrt3200acs if you were to buy today. Warning, the wrt3200acs has buggy closed source WiFi drivers, so it's not a great choice unless you've got another AP and it is very cheap.

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Thanks @dana44 for your suggestions. I will take a look to that comparative and try to understand it. I will consider getting a C7 for now as main router and in the future use it as AP.

Is there any "general" preference while choosing a router in the terms of target / soc-cpu ? By general I mean a common choose by OpenWRT users.

Finally I'm upgrading from 120 to 300 Mbps for my internet connection. I actually have an Archer C7 as my main router and a Mi Router 3G as dump AP.

My concerns now are about if I need to upgrade my main router or if It's possible to keep one of them (as main router) with my requirements: OpenWRT running: SQM, OpenVPN (just to have access to my home from outside), uPnP, DynDNS, DNS over TLS.

What are the community recommendations?

Thanks in advance.

Trial and error?

Does it work, problem solved.
Doesn't work, look for an upgrade....