I am looking for some advice on a new router, I currently have the Linksys EA8300 but since 24.10 I have noticed a lot of intermittent disconnects, daily, sometimes several per day, and even while connected via Ethernet. I have tried reflashing the router and starting over from fresh but still run into the same issues. In general, I have always found its Wifi range to be somewhat lacking anyway so I figured it might be time to upgrade the router to something more reliable/robust to address these frequent drops.
I don’t have a strict budget, obviously paying less is preferable but if a router is known to be more stable, then I would rather pay the extra up to around £150.
My current shortlist, based on the following requirements is:
A well supported chipset with good wifi performance
At least 128MB of flash storage, 256MB preferable
512MB RAM
At least a dual core 1Ghz
2 or more LAN ports in addition to the Internet/WAN port
Runs OpenWRT 24.10/24.10.2
Two partitions, to allow me to have a backup copy of OpenWRT/OEM firmware as a fallback
Is reasonably modern with OEM firmware that is still supported in the case it is used as a fallback
Available in the UK
So based on that the list of routers that fit this is fairly small, with my shortlist being the Linksys AX5300 (£40), based on the Qualcomm IPQ8174 chipset or the D-Link M30 AX3000 (£40), based on the MediaTek MT7981BA. Has anyone got experience with these two routers on OpenWRT and does anyone have any other suggestions?
I looked at the GL.iNet GL-MT6000 (£115) but it does not appear to have a dual partition. While it’s performance will be the best of the three, I am not sure if the gain is so large as to be worth the loss of a fallback installation.
Do you really need the fallback partition so often? MT-6000 has a good oem recovery flash http interface, which can be easily triggered and used to flash a new image. That has served me well at those times when needed.
MT-6000 is pretty much the current all-around champ for OpenWrt.
Dual partition is really rare, so that requirement narrows the field quite a lot, as you have already noticed.
Would using two different devices be an option? One for routing and whatever the software world allows, and another one as a dumb AP?
For the routing part, maybe consider a Raspberry Pi 4, which can be bought for under £100 including case and SD card, if you go for the 4GB RAM version. It can handle something like WireGuard on its Gigabit link at line speed (as seen in the comparison DB thread: A Wireguard comparison DB). Or go for a Pi 5 if you need more power, with only a small increase in price.
You can have as many backup partitions as you want through the magic of putting them on different SD cards.
As for the AP—since you didn't specify your performance target beyond "good"—the current poster child of the category "reasonable cheap and good bang for the buck" is the Cudy WR3000 (E, H, or S models; just avoid the non-letter version). You can get them for around £50 each on Amazon. It doesn't come with a secondary partition, but a dumb AP typically doesn't require frequent changes, so that might not be a concern.
Economically speaking, the RPi (4 or 5) is rarely a viable choice anymore (although it has the performance). A new (and faster) Intel N100 (N97/ N150) with multiple (2-4) 2.5 GBit/s ethernet ports starts around 120 EUR (up to ~250 EUR) delivered (at least if ordered from abroad), running at ~5 watts idle, complete in case, PSU, SSD, RAM, included, delivered post taxes and shipping costs and no costly addon adapters or USB devices required.
(There are also rockchip based devices, filogic 830/ 830, etc. pp. - and a lot of x86_64 options on the second hand markets).
Unless you need the specific features of the RPi (GPIOs, MIPI, CSI, …, none of which matter for this particular use case as a router), its ecosystem has gotten rather expensive - especially after including the real costs for all necessary addon things (PSU, case, USB3 ethernet card, NVMe adapter, SSD, …) into the tally.