Many years ago, for cable internet having 500MB down and 50MB up, I purchased a Linksys WRT1900ACS. The WiFi was so poor performing and unreliable that I ended up purchasing a Netgear R7800. The Netgear WiFi performed reliably but its ethernet connection did not perform as well as the Linksys. On ethernet, Linksys would max out the 500MB down whereas the Negear would get 430-450MB down usually.
If I were to move cable internet to 1GB down and 50MB up, neither the Linksys nor the Netgear can fully capture the download speed available. If I was to buy new kit, I'd like to fully utilize the 1GB down and have reliable well-performing WiFi. I would also like to be able to connect 9 clients (e.g., Apple TVs, desktop computers, a laptop, a TiVO, an IP Phone, printer, etc). I also have a spare TP-Link router that I turn on when I have guests that need WiFi.
Is there a 4-CPU router on the market now that can run OpenWRT and provide the 1GB down consistently with reliable WiFi and handle processing needs of 9-10 clients? Also, would you recommend an unmanaged or a managed switch for my client setup? I do utilize the Apple TV screen sharing function with an iPad so I'm assuming the Apple TV and iPad would have to be same connection; I don't know if this would be affected if the Apple TV was plugged into a managed switch, how this would work exactly.
The DL-WRX36 uses target ipq807x, but I don't see this target listed in the 22.03.3 OpenWRT release. Any luck ipq807x target will be available in 22.03.4 release?
Like frollic says, so far the router looks good. I have mainly been using it as dumb AP, but likely I will switch it to be my main router (instead of R7800) once I get a serial cable connector for it.
Ps .
In deviation to my usual habits, I have used imagebuilder to compile the firmware for DL-WRX36, and so far no surprises.
I have been using E8450/RT3200 and now also DL-WRX36, and both are ok for the CPU power, but both have only internal antennas, so the Wifi range is lower than it is for R7800 with (proper) external antennas, I think.
Of the current ipq807x ath11k offering I selected the DL-WRX36 because it has straight-forward installation process, although it is much more complex and multi-step than with R7800. And because it is one of the most CPU power ipq807x devices there.
(I got burned two years ago with RAX120 v1, which will never be supported due to its early generation 802.11ax wifi chip. But the RAX120v2 looks also promising if its PR gets finalised/polished and accepted. That might have better Wifi range than E8450/RT3200 or DL-WRX36.)
Did you enable the hardware offload? My WRT1900ACv2 & WRT3200ACM has no issue on delivering 1G NAT throughput, but yes the wireless part is bad....however you might be able to use 1900ACS without WiFi and connect Netgear as AP only
Oh...just checked again, mine was using "software offloading", sorry for mistake, but it's still able to give almost 900Mbps throughput which is not bad.
