I'm looking for a new router to replace my ~6-year old Buffalo WZR-600DHP. I recently upgraded my internet speed, and the Wifi isn't enough anymore.
One particular requirement I have is that I recently started getting into smart home stuff, so I have a lot of devices connected to my Wifi network (around 20 at the moment). I've noticed a slow down due to this. Seems like MU-MIMO might be the answer to this, but it's not supported on OpenWRT?
So I'm looking for a good, not too expensive router that'll work with many devices. So far, I've looked at the Archer A9 (not conclusive if it'll work on OpenWRT), GL.iNet Convexa B (looks cool, but shipping to Canada is pricey).
Here are my answers to the questions in the FAQ
How fast is your internet connection? 120Mbps
Do you need Wi-Fi? Yes. I mostly use wifi; I only have one device on Ethernet at the moment
Do you need Gigabit Ethernet? Yes, but 4 ports is enough (plus the upstream one)
Do you need USB ports? How many? USB 2.0 or 3.0? Not really
How many family members/devices must the router support? We're a family of 6, but as I said we have 20+ devices connected to WiFi
What other services do you want? VPN and Adblock. I have a home server for everything else.
Finally, please define your price range.As said in the title, around 100$
I use Xiaomi 4A Gigabit. Flashing openwrt is not as simple as take a firmware and upload, but does not need any hardware mod.
For my experience achieve 400Mbit/s in wireless (AC 80Mhz client), 100Mbit/s without cpu bound under VPN (Wireguard, throthled from client side with 100M ethernet).
That is not a huge barrier. Iterating on the previous answer: A MT7621-based device should be fine for that speed. (Personally, I'm using a Netgear R6220 and I'm very happy with it.) Alternatively, an IPQ-based device should give even more headroom, and as far as I know, the problems with IPQ devices have been fixed with the most recent 19.07.5 release.
Of course, there's always "something better", but personally, I believe that investing into an uncertain future demand is a bit silly. "Just fine" right now will do just fine right now.
Here's a quick tip: I recently found that the only 2.4G Wifi devices I have are the ones I want to put on a separate IOT network anyway. The devices on my "main network" are all capable of 5G Wifi. So I put all the IOT devices on the 2.4G Wifi interface, and my main devices on the 5G Wifi interface. This way, my IOT devices are neatly separated in their own firewall zone, and it also saved me from a more complicated setup with multiple Wifi networks on one Wifi interface.
Yeah, that's a good point that actually occurred to me right after posting this: I'll probably re-purpose my current router to be the IOT router; on different channels so there's no interference at all. I'll probably still bridge the networks (so discovery still works well); I think my bottleneck is time-based multiplexing between clients, not a bandwidth issue.
Be careful with that Aliexpress listing as it includes two different models. The 100 Mb model (do not buy, it's MT7628 chip) is $17.92; the gigabit model is $30.81.
A MT7621 device will be fine if by VPN, you mean "Wireguard." However, you'll need more CPU to utilize more of your 120 Mbps ISP connection with OpenVPN. A used e-bay Linksys EA8500 (ipq8064) plus a $10 USB serial dongle to flash it will be more capable and should fit well within your budget. Plenty of flash and RAM memory too. It's not a subtle router though - 4 antennas bumps it up in size. It's not going to "disappear" in the living room LOL.
At the time of this post,
The Netgear R6850 using MediaTek MT7621AT 880 MHz, 2 cores is on sale at Amazon.ca for $99.00
and
Since it uses MT7621AT, hardware flow offloading is supported by OpenWrt.
Thank you. Yes, by VPN I mean Wireguard, more specifically tunnelling some traffic back home when I'm out travelling (which isn't often these days, but it'll come back). I'm limited by my 10Mbps upload speed for this anyway; I don't think I need an extremely fast processor for this.
I tend to take reviews with a grain of salt for several reasons:
All the devices are running MediaTek cpu's and radios, the main distinction between them is the firmware. Firmware which you will be replacing with OpenWrt.
It is usually not clear that poor reviews have trouble shoot channel congestion etc.
Some less than ethical companies pay for good reviews on their products and even less ethical companies smear the competition - kinda like US politics .
Netgear/Xiaomi devices need a special app to load OpenWrt.
I would post in the WR1300 thread to see if any one running OpenWrt has performance issues.
Thanks, I know about the paid reviews, but I read these reviews (on Amazon) and they seemed genuine (lots of details pointing to similar issues), so I'm inclined to believe them.
Xiaomi seems like it's kind of a pain to load OpenWrt on, so I'll probably steer clear of them. The wiki pages for Netgear devices seemed to imply that it's as simple as just uploading the firmware image through the web interface? That was the process on my current Buffalo router, so I'm fine with this.
The Cudy you recommended seems like it uses a pretty old, customized version of OpenWRT; not sure about current support as it's not in the table of hardware. The wifi speed on the Netgear is faster as well. I think the Cudy router could be pretty good for 50$, but I'm ready to spend double that, so I'd prefer getting something better if I can.
You can have 100 devices connected without it being a problem even for old 11b wifi networks. It's only a problem if all those devices make actual significant use of the network at the same time. Most IOT devices (should, barring bugs) never make significant use of the network. So I wouldn't presume that your problems have to do with having 20 devices connected.
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