Asus GT-AX11000 (BCM4908, BCM43684, AQR109)

Hello,

might be a strange question but what are the chances that the Asus GT-AX11000 will get a working openwrt version?

https://wikidevi.com/wiki/ASUS_GT-AX11000

It is using a BCM4908 SoC with three BCM43684 for Wifi and AQR109 for ethernet.

Since this is a 64 bit plattform, i guess there is still a long road to get that running correctly, am i right?

Historically, broadcom support has been poor. That is likely the largest hurdle.

Argh this is sad. Doesn't look like it will change any near in the future

I'm resurrecting this old topic just to see if there is any hope for GT-AX11000 support 2+ years later. fingers crossed

No, it's still broadcom, therefor no support. Sadly there is no good wifi 6 router support in OpenWrt yet no matter what hardware.

If you want a "high end" router that'll do Gigabit SQM and have WiFi 6 these days don't buy this junk. Get something like the NanoPi R4S / x86 dual eth mini PC / Rpi4 /etc. install OpenWrt and connect WiFi 6 access points like the U6-Lite-US.

Thanks for the follow-up. I already have an extremely capable x86 box, but I also already own "this junk" which I use strictly as an AP. It does a bang-up job as an AP running Asuswrt-merlin builds. Just was hoping to move it to OpenWRT on the odd chance anything had change over the recent years.

I'll keep on rocking Asuswrt on it since it's doing the AP role just fine. Thanks

AsusWrt-Merlin is great I agree, I've lately given that for friends/gf routers. The RT-AX58U with that installed for the average user for example. It's just not OpenWrt, can't live without it right now from a hobbiest/enthusiast perspective.

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Agreed! I still have a Netgear R7800 that runs OpenWrt, but the signal strength was too weak at the extents of my house. I may even eventually go with a multi-AP approach, but the GT-AX11000 signal is doing the trick for now. I have several VLANs trunked into my AX11000 so I can run several discrete SSIDs. Anyway, enough rambling from me...

Maybe one of these days Broadcom will show up at the table and let the world help them move forward. :slight_smile:

Does the AX11000 have much better signal? I'm curious. That's what I did with my WRT32X. I use it as my main router since it handles SQM cake at 600Mbits and handles my 2TB USB3 storage maxing out the gigabit lan at 120MB/s read-write which is impressive for Samba4 on a router. This seems to be good for my cable internet, then I used the U6-Lite-US wap to add wifi6 in a more central place.

Maybe I picked some less than optimal wording because in my experience it's not so much that the AX11000 has stronger signal, but it outperforms the R7800 throughput at the same distances. I had been having trouble with the ath10k-ct driver/firmware for some time, but the ath10k driver/firmware delivered consistent throughput. But the AX11000 is significantly higher, especially on my 3x3 devices.

All that said, it may just be due to the doubling of physical antenna count from the R7800 to the AX11000, but the AX11000 also is better handling signal coverage in spots where the R7800 seemed to have some dead-zones.

Gotcha yea, the AX11000 does look like a wifi beast. That's actually why I picked up the WiFi 6 access point. WRT32X isn't known for wifi anyway so I use the WAP in a more central location and it performs great and no latency issues.

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802.11ax is a significant improvement over 802.11ac (even relative to wave2), not so much in total range, but performance over the range (not to speak about short range throughput, which can exceed that of wired 1000BASE-T). This is not unique to bcm43684 but common to all high-end 802.11ax devices (e.g. also ipq8074a), the additional antennas (often 8x8 on 5 GHz, but at least 4x4) also do their part to improve wireless robustness.

Chances for BCM43684 support in OpenWrt however are (and likely remain forever) close to zero.

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I'm circling back around to this thread/device. Hypothetically, if one did not care about the wireless radios inside this unit and wanted to use it only for router/firewall purposes, is it possible the BCM4908 could be supported?

Plenty of options that just work™, now (or close to).

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