Hello! I would like to hear your expert opinions on routers, new or second hand, that are currently available in Europe (Finland). It's good enough if there is a promising PR pending, does not need to be in stable yet. Extra points if the switch has DSA support already available.
How fast is your internet connection? ~300Mbps
Do you need Wi-Fi? Yes, WiFi 5 will do
Do you need Gigabit Ethernet? Yes, 3-5 ports
Do you need USB ports? No, but I don't mind them
How many family members/devices must the router support? One
What other services do you want? QoS (cake?), adblock and possibly wireguard
Price range: below 100€ EUR, if possible.
I hope I am not too unrealistic with my expectations, I really don't know what HW can achieve what. With ~120€ one can get an MikroTik hap ac3 but it looks like an overkill to me and if possible I would like to find a second hand one just to keep the device it out of landfill.
Oh, I didn't expect it would be that powerful. The OpenWrt wikipage has some disclaimers aboud missing shielding and interference. And 2022 one about an Eon flash chip that does not work.
Netgear XR500 (the almost identical successor to R7800) might also be enough, (although 300 Mbit might be tough if you use CPU hungry cake qdisc in SQM)
Both of those have excellent OpenWrt support and have an easy recovery processes if/when something goes wrong.
Ps. I have both R7800 and RT3200
PPS. With 300 Mbit connection you are probably better off with SQM with fq_codel/simple qdisc instead of the cake qdisc.
For the money, I'm a big Fan of Cudy routers. They are compliant with releasing source code, use a modified OpenWRT out of the box, provide OpenWRT builds for certain models on their site which made it a breeze to port those devices to OpenWRT proper.
The AC2100 uses the Mediatek Mt7621 dual core cpu and I can't comment if it is fast enough for Cake/SQM. I run the same chipset with just stubby (DNS over TLS) and get as much as my ISP will deliver - I've had speed tests around 340Mbps.
If you're after speed, and not a cheap device, the Cudy and Xiaomi aren't good choices, they're simply too slow for today's usage, being AC only.
The only AC device I'd buy today would be used AC2600s, if they were cheap.
If that's not fast enough for you, start looking at the AX1800s and AX3200s.
The original post said his internet connection was around 300Mbps. The specs for radios on the Cudy AC2100 are:
1733Mbps in 5GHz band and 300Mbps in 2.4GHz band.
I would not argue against devices with 11AX radios from the standpoint of future proofing. Given that the bottleneck for @sandberg is the ISP, 11AC devices are a valid consideration.
As for the arguement for Xiaomi devices, they are a much more difficult install and have no support from Xiaomi. Lastly, if you support OpenSource, Cudy is compliant, and returns emails/source code for their devices. Xiaomi never has. Essentially your purchase rewards a company for complying with the GPL 2.0 license.
Without linux and opensource code, OpenWRT would not exist.
The comments were more about the SOC performance of mt7621a than the wireless itself. Yes, mt7621a relies on very well optimized ethernet/ switch drivers and hardware flow-offloading, but anything that needs to be handled by the SOC (e.g. SQM) would push it beyond its abilities at those WAN speeds.
I am not after speed that much, I was quite happy with my 50/10Mbps line, but with their pricing policy the ISP is forcing me to get a faster line and my current router is a bottle neck at the moment. And once I am updating I want to get something that covers my needs in the foreseeable future. The capacity to run 300Mbps should be good for me for a long time.
Dying in what way? Not being used by manufacturers or lacking the care it needs from developer community?
