If you're a reseller, and if you're buying in quantities of tens of thousands, then yes, you're a reseller, then the issue is more this: it will be cheaper for you to specify in your contract a maximum rate of failures, and to "self-insure" against that rate than to really do anything else. Only if the white box supplier is sending you batches with more than X failure rate (negotiated in your contract) do you even talk with them.
So, let's say 3% failure rate in the first year is your acceptable level. You buy 10k units, you just accept that 300 of them will fail, you charge 3% more on your reselling, and if more than 300 units come back to you broken, you go to your supplier and request them to look into failures and give you a discount on your next order...
We're all resellers in this life as we're part of some value chain. But no, I'm not trying to sell anything to this forum or abuse the community. The contrary, trying to add value. @jwoods, your curiosity will keep bothering you I'm afraid til you find some other productive way of engaging with users or till a moderator puts a stop to it @diakelan, I get that contracts with white-box vendors can have h/w warranties. However, you don't get a device with huge economies of scale, tested and reviewed by thousands of people. There's that tradeoff. Typically ISPs buy from primary APAC-based OEM vendors that can optionally supply the firmware as well. I just haven't seen an approach where the underlying massively produced hardware is optimized for LEDE or OpenWRT. And even when it is, such as in the case of branded router versions, the vendor does not provide warranty on the underlying hardware on an individual or bulk scale case.
It all comes down to how massive is your order. If you want 10M units you can get someone who will design you something and test that something against your choice of firmware and redesign it a few times to optimize it, or help you write drivers for the special chips or whatever. If you want 10k units you have to go with something someone already designed.
You're probably best off to find some company on alibaba that already has an "openwrt" router designed, then get about 20 of them and hire someone to fine-tune the kernel modules etc to get you the reliability and speed and features you want. Then please contribute your modifications to upstream LEDE/OpenWRT or Kernel developers so that you can benefit from continued refinement. Then place your order for 10k units and do whatever you want with them.
It mostly depends on the Countries consumer laws. In Australia we have very strong consumer rights. A company can say they won't support the hardware if you install 3rd-party software on it, but the law states they have to. Lots of companies in Australia publish that they won't do certain things in the hopes people won't follow through.
If you go to the branded OEMs and negotiate, they can give you enough spares to cover the risk. Basically you insure it in a lower price that allows you to get more spare units.
If you go to a white box vendor, the warranty essentially is written in the contract, i.e. acceptable number of units that can fail within 1 year or so.
So, in essence it's a non issue. If you're an individual, the retail won't care and will replace it without checking too much and if you're making larger orders of h/w and flashing it, you can either bake it into the price or the contract depending on where the supplying entity has the corporate flexibility.
If you purchase devices designed for bring-your-own software, they are supported. But even companies like MicroTik won't support issues caused by manipulating the flash (e.g. installing your own custom firmware).
Granted, the kind of devices usually aren't consumer-grade, either.
Following up on the Alibaba idea, I've been unimpressed by the devices that are being offered there. Very poor design, sometimes even 6 antennas that make the device look awful.
But i cant recommend any non-ath9k based wifi device. The linked have some WLAN-AC chipset.
At the moment all WLAN-AC devices require closed-source firmware to run. ath9k based devices dont require closed-source software to run the wifi.
