Google Onhub radio2 performance

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Inspired by this thread

I have an application that wants 3 radios. I like the Google onhub devices, and am appalled at support being dropped. I've always wanted one. Sidenote - why are so many sellers listing these at $20+ on ebay etc. Surely they are a paperweight once taken out of operation?

On the onhub device pages the monitoring wifi radio is noted as:

"Note transfer speeds are slow on radio2 as it was designed for monitoring, not for data transfers"

I am interested to know of any experience (speed / distance) using radio2.

Speed is not a big issue for my application - Im using an Archer C7 as my main router (fairly simple configuration) using mwan3 to offer failover connection via 4G Lte (the backup SIM is nominally limited to 20 Mbs). As 4G reception in my house is poor, i have a LTE/wifi router positioned in good reception and have another Openwrt in client bridge mode connected via 5G wifi, with its LAN port connected to a second designated WAN port of the Archer C7. I get a NAT ip address via DHCP on the second WAN interface. Its been working fine. Rather than using the additional wireless client, it would be neater to connect to a 3rd wifi on the main router.

Or should i be looking for a 2nd hand EA8300 instead? (which also seem to go for cheap). Im not in the US, and somehow very few tri band routers are sold here.

2

QCA9882 is only 1x1 (compared to 3x3 on the main radios, respectively 2x2 on most typical clients),that halves throughput from the get-go. In most cases, taking the interference of operating it would cause for the main radios into account, it's probably more sensible to keep it disabled (or used only for passive scanning), just add a second vAP interface to your main radios.

1 Like
3

Oh, care to explain in more detail? I tried to find some info on adding a second wifi interface to the same radio, and all i can find is adding a guest interface - Is that kind of what you mean.