Do you own this device ?
What would be a nice casing for this board ?
Recently sold my R7000 (amazing router) for the WRT32X because I wanted an OpenWrt supported router. It's priced at $150-200. This one is very fast being nearly identical to the WRT3200ACM. Similar capabilities to the R7800 (better in some ways worse than others). The WRT32X also looks amazing and has fast USB/eSATA storage support. I recommend these both as "high end" options too.
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as I know, MU-MIMO doesn't have yet driver support on OpenWrt so Wave2 hardware it's pretty useless now
Don't think there are any OpenWrt routers with MU-MIMO support yet. The wifi driver developer for the Linksys WRT routers (WRT3200ACM / WRT32X / etc.) claimed to be working on adding this feature a few months back but the progress is unknown:
MU doesn’t really make sense on 3 stream routers as most new MU clients are two stream. Plus from tests I’ve seen only the QCA9984 does well in MU tests giving an actual boost. Broadcom is the worst of the three as it actually causes a loss in performance.
Interesting. Honestly anything over 500Mbits wi-fi sounds meaningless to me at this point. Most of my network is wired to the gigabit switch anyway. In the process of switching my R7000 DD-WRT setup to WRT32X OpenWrt 18.06 setup (R7000 is an awesome router but I've wanted OpenWrt support for a while now so selling it). Hope the Wi-fi has improved to the point where it'll work well there were some early complaints with mwlwifi.
is there any MT7621 device using non-MT7603EN for 2.4Ghz? it seems mt7603en has hardware issues to provide a reliable 2.4G connection so should be avoided?
ZyXEL NBG6617, it has excellent wireless coverage and stability.
https://wikidevi.com/wiki/ZyXEL_NBG6617
This looks like a pretty sweet device and it even has a quad core...
Yes, there is also avm fritz!box 4040 (26 days uptime without problems) but zyxel has more wireless coverage probably because it has external antennas.
Does openwrt fully support 4addr mode on the WRT32X? I have a WRT3200ACM that has been gathering dust on my shelf because I couldn't get the radio to work in both master(WDS) and client mode at the same time (in addition to weird WiFi problems with android phones, which appear to affect both openwrt and the stock firmware). The problem seems to persist in 18.06. As a result, I'm still using a pair of R7800s. In fact, I mostly prefer the Netgear device--the trivial unbrick through tftp is super nice, but I have gigabit broadband and the R7800's NAT can't quite keep up. (I know there's theoretically hardware NAT on the R7800, but I haven't found a step-by-step guide to enabling it.)
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Both routers are basically identical in terms of hardware, the wlan cards are Marvell 88W8964 in both cases, so don't expect any difference beyond the colour of the case.
I'm very happy with my two NBG6617 - in daily use I feel no differens between them and my R7800 (all working as AP's)
Use an x86 mini PC with dual Intel NIC at these speeds especially with bufferbloat management you really need the CPU speed of x86.
In my experience the NATs on the WRT1900ACS and WRT3200ACM do keep up (using default buffer management). But the WiFi on the linksys routers doesn't work as well, and the WRT3200ACM has broken WDS support. There don't seem to be any good PCI/PCIe WiFi cards out there (please correct me if I'm wrong), so even with a PC I'd still need an R7800 as an access point. If I cared enough to have two boxes, I'd just use one of the linksys boxes with the radio off...
There's a mitigating factor here that my ISP lets me have multiple public IP addresses. The computer that I care most about has two NICs, one connected to the internal network, one to the outside. That machine's traffic never goes through NAT. I set that machine up as the IPv6 gateway, and so can get top speed through IPv6. I use a very short AdvValidLifetime in radvd, so if do maintenance on the server, the network quickly reverts to v4-only, which is not too disruptive. Were this not the case, I'm sure I'd be exploring two-box solutions.
Yes, after this commit https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/0a492ee39e1c1a226dc34923909459117077b4c5 is very stable.
I hope that @blogic or someone else port this also on 18.06 branch.
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I think you need to take the reports of WIFI with a grain of salt...
For instance, I have two WRT3200ACM in different locations and they work great with a bunch of phones (including Android, QCA based ones) and other device. IPQ8 or rather ath10k does also have issues so it's not like the grass is greener on the other side in that regard. As far as performance goes the IPQ8 is slightly faster in terms of raw processing power but you'll most likely never notice a difference between the two in the end. Worth taking into consideration is that the Marvell platform is more mature in terms of support which can affect your experience however if you're just looking for a "generic soho router" both platforms will most likely do the job fine.
The most (potential) powerful platform for now would probably be the ClearFog GT 8K in terms of price performance if you want ARM however adding RAM, WIFI etc makes it about as expensive as an x86 system which is going to be faster. Also, this board does not yet (at least) have support in OpenWrt.
Is this already supported by OpenWrt?
If I read the git commit log and the generated images for mvebu/cortexa72 correctly, the answer seems to be "not yet". SOC support exists and the SolidRun ClearFog GT 8K might be close enough to Marvell's devboard to make this not too difficult (still too early to actually recommend at this point, as expectations might not be met when it comes to OpenWrt support).
Also expect another 100 USD to go into pigtails/ antennas (you need a lot of antennas for 802.11ac or better) and 30-60 USD into shipping, if you're not located in the US (plus ~40 USD VAT, fun with customs, etc.). It's very interesting (ARMv6/ ARM64 and basically as much RAM as you like) and one of the best/ 'cheapest' ARMv8 options (albeit headless) available to mere mortals so far, but it's not quite competing with consumer devices either.