GL-MT300N-V2 or GL-ARM300M

Greetings all.

Of the two low cost lower end travel routers I’ve been playing with, one is the GL-MT300N-V2 the other GL-ARM300M. I have a more capable GL.iNet router for other situations, but I also have need of one of those aforementioned devices.

Previous Thread:
@slh I read a thread where you addressed some of the questions I was interested in, and I wondered if you could help shed light on my question below.

My setup:

  • One computer connected to the router via an Ethernet cable on the LAN side, and for internet access I'll either have a USB-tethered hotspot connected directly to the router -or- a phone connected via Ethernet to the WAN Ethernet jack.

Question:

  • My needs are not concerned with WiFi nor running a VPN directly on these devices. What’s more important are aspects of throughput, latency, routing speeds, and packet loss. With that said, if I were to choose one of the two options listed in the title of my message, which one would fit the use case I’ve outlined?

GL-ARM300M, all the way, better cpu and ath9k radio.

Thanks for the reply. I hear where you're coming from, but what do you think about the details written in the following post, starting at the third paragraph onwards:

It sounds like the MT7628 does better with routing and NAT acceleration than does the QCA9531. While the latter SoC has a better radio, that is not something that matters much for the application which I will use one of these lower cost routers.

I also see mention of SQM in that post, though I'm not as familiar with that function and have not investigated what the implications would be of enabling it. I'll research it further, though if you have any thoughts to share on the pros and cons of enabling it, it would be appreciated.

I have used both. Although on "paper" the AR300M seems better, in practice I have found the MT300N-v2 to be the winner.

This was not always the case. Initially, the open source 7628 wireless drivers were very poor, but for the last couple of years the drivers have become very mature with much improved throughput, stability, range and sensitivity resulting in a much more capable device.

Don't be fooled by the external antenna version of the AR300M, these are very much a compromise with internal shunting to prevent damage if run without the antennas connected resulting in much of the advantage of having external being negated. In this respect the MT300N-v2 is (with the latest drivers OpenWrt 19.07.2 onwards I think) much better.

The AR300M and MT300N-v2 are both top quality and capable devices, given the age of the design.

Comparing the two, there is really not a lot of difference apart from:

  1. The AR300M can be difficult for the uninitiated due to the dual flash on current models - ending up in a "what the he*l is happening" situation.
  2. The MT300N-v2 wireless, in practice, is better.
  3. The MT300N-v2 is cheaper

i don't think so in a million year

It does of course depend on your use case. In general use, and particularly the proposed use here, there is not a noticeable difference.
For specific use cases there are advantages and disadvantages to both, although if you are after the ultimate in performance you should look at more up to date hardware.

yes, i understand that, but please you can't compare the qualcom radio with mediatech, i still think that not even ath10k and mwlwifi are comparable with ath9k on 2.4 ghz N

I'm talking about real world performance of the wireless on these two devices, not comparing qualcom with mediatech.

have you ever see an uptime of 130 days on yours mediatech device? on my mediatech device, different one more powefull than GL-MT300N-V2 , i never have see something over 2 weeks, and that's my point. i don't need a car that can go 300 km/h if i can only make 20 km, i need a car that will do 200 km/h and never let me down.

All I can say is I have numerous MT300N-v2s running as mesh nodes that have been up for over a year.
Absolutely, the early pre 76x8 open source drivers were very unstable, but this has long since been fixed as an issue, at least on the MT300N-v2. This is the reason the manufacturers used proprietary MT blobs in their original firmware.

The QCA SoC has a 70 MHz higher clock, but from what I can tell they're both from the same generation. Topic starter is not interested in the wireless, so it doesn't look like as clear-cut a case to me as you make it seem.

@bonkeymananas No way to get your hands on a MT7621 device like slh suggested in that other thread? If not, the MT7628 MT300N v2 still seems like the better choice if you're looking at NAT performance. If you were to use SQM then the slightly higher clocked QCA SoC might give you a bit more of an edge on the MT7628 (but not that much probably).

Gl.iNet has an MT7621 based travel router but it's a bit pricey:

Thanks for the reply. I was lucky enough to get a GL-MT1300 about a week ago - soon I'll be able to start testing it.

That said, I still have need for a smaller device like the MT300N-v2 or the ARM300M for a particular use case. Could you help me understand the benefits and limitations of using SQM?

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You can find the info in the wiki:

And detailed background info:

Delving in a bit. Apologies for not having first looked for those links myself.

Perhaps this might be a guess for yourself or anyone else, but is there a downside to using SQM on the AR300M vs simply going with the native routing abilities of the MT300N-V2?

Using SQM disables any NAT hardware offload your SoC might offer (which the QCA does not). Hence why you need more raw power if you want to use SQM.

You might not need SQM, in which case the MediaTek is the better choice. Up to you to test and decide.