Hi,
my last experience with WRT54 and OpenWRT years ago was completly positive.
That led me to buying a 3200AC blindly and having enjoyed the ac speed of about 60MB/s somewhere between November and December, and never since than again. Todays status is wireless is working unless you use i.. Marvell and Linksys seem to wait for something being developed (maybe) "next month".
That being said, is there any ac Router out there, that is providing a working, ideally blobfree, open source wireless stack and is supported by LEDE/OpenWRT?
Netgear R7800 actually works quite brilliant. Have a new one running now with 18 days of uptime. some minor cosmetic errors in the logs, but it's a lot nicer, if compared with the new Linksys wrt devices.
I used a TP Link WDR3600v1 for a long time with solid compatibility and other users on OpenWRT/LEDE. So I bought a TP Link Archer C7 for .11ac and the fact that it has 2 CPU eth. connections to the switch. The later makes more difference than the former. Again I found that it just works and lots of common users. There is higher performance hardware, but if you have <200Mbps cable ISP, then you may not really use it. The Atheros .11ac radio does have its own small firmware which is a blob. I think the problem there is with beam forming and other .11ac technologies, the radio blobs give away too much hardware detail if open sourced (for now).
It's not 'small'. The ath10k firmware blob handles a lot of stuff that should really be handled by the driver but QCA decided not to. That alone would be a reason not to buy it, IMHO. Mt76 has a small firmware, ath10k most definitely does not.
Personally, I learned my painful lesson after I purchased the Linksys EA6900 (which uses Broadcom). That router was fast, no doubt about it, but it was so painfully unstable. The wifi would drop every hour, I had to schedule a daily reboot, etc. It drove me absolutely insane that I was about to completely give up on wifi.
I found this video and I purchased a WNDR3700. Couldn't be happier. Wifi is rock solid, router is stable, maybe the performance isn't as good as the EA6900 but I don't care because it's stable. If you want stability, go with open-source drivers. This basically limits your options to ath9k for 802.11N and mt76 for 802.11AC.
I have the Archer C7 v2 running LEDE RC2 and so far, everything work very well. Bought november 2016 and running since on LEDE flawlessely, altought I only have 1 AC device, the rest share both frequencies with a mix of G and N devices (more than 10 devices).
well at least the ath10k firmware and driver sees really active development, and also works (as far as i have seen) flawlessly. Something that cannot be said for the Linksys/Belkin concoctions. updates are flaky, quality of the firmware and driver is often so-so at best, and it seems to be developed in the spare time of one of the Marvell developers.
Reason why i picked the r7800 as a router for my family is that it is powerfull enough as well to serve as a NAS, and handle 20 clients using a 500mbit FTTH internet connection with ease as well.
That ofcourse doens't disqualify the Mediatek chips. How powerfull are the MT76 chips? The dualcore 800mhz cpu left me a bit wondering if it was strong enough.
FWIW, when I switched from Archer to DIR-860L there was a noticeable jump in processing power. I've only used 860L for a few days until I've discovered one of the LAN ports didn't work so I can't comment on WiFi stability/performance.
I actually did flash Xvortex's cfe along with dd-wrt, Tomato, and Asuswrt-Merlin and it wasn't stable with all of those combinations. It was a fast and powerful router, I'll give it that.
I'm a TP-Link Archer C7 v2 user as well. And while I'm very happy with it, I wouldn't say that the wifi is flawless in absolute terms. The ath10k wifi driver/firmware has, at least on the Archer C7 v2, an issue with the Google Nexus 5X phone as a client (when the Nexus 5X is connected to the 5GHz radio, the ath10k driver will crash after a while and the 5GHz radio will be down until the router is rebooted). This is a longstanding issue, that has been reported upstream by others and me [1].
Nevertheless, this is the only issue I have witht he ath10k firmware. All my other clients work flawlessly. And as I can work around the issue easily (I let my Nexus 5X only connect to the 2.4GHz radio), it's also not a big deal for me. In addition, even commercial products/firmwares tend to have issues from time to time that only occur with a certain combination of different devices, so expecting absolutely bug-free operation under all possible circumstances may be a little too much to ask for.
@all, thanks for the suggestions. I ordered an D-Link DIR-860L and found an used Archer C7 v2 for the meantime.
Archer C7 v2 is working very stable - a bit slow WiFi in my case, but that's something for later. Right now my focus is on VPN, DynIP and Cake.
If someone from the more patient developers is interested in the 3200AC feel free to contact me.