A woman in the neighbourhood asked me about poor wifi from her cable provider modem/router combo. I have experience getting much better WiFi from a router running OpenWrt than the unit she is running from our cable provider, but I'm not ready to recommend flashing a device to this person.
For a completely non-technical person is there anything better than the IQrouter these days? It looks like she could just plug it in and get SQM and airtime fairness and not need to worry about understanding anything?
If you're helping this person, why not just recommend a device you know about, and flash it for her? Set the root password, set up a basic SSID she uses, set up a password, and hand it off (non-contact COVID style).
I had a friend with bufferbloat issues causing problems for our video calls, and I happened to have an older TP-Link lying around, so I did this, it took me about a half hour, I left it by my front door, the friend dropped by and grabbed it.. instant improvement.
I would also recommend considering Google WiFi even though it is not OpenWrt based. Google supports those routers for a long time and it is truly set and forget. They are running open source Chromium OS.
I would say not much, IMHO both IQrouter and to a lesser degree turris omnia/mox are suited for non-technical audiences (both offer automatic update notifications and have active developers behind them), the IQrouter has some bells an whistles in the SQM department...
I don't really have direct experience, have been following them for a while, and recommended them to a few folks, on ef which was very happy with it.
From what I've heard over time, an IQ Router is based on OpenWrt, uses the SQM improvements, not sure but maybe now uses the Airtime Queuing and Fairness of the Make-Wifi-Fast group? They seemed to have started with the C7 as a platform, but have migrated to faster hardware now. Their big thing is their own added features of self assessing the connection and self configuring the SQM, so a non tech savvy customer can just install and they're done. Maybe that's not news to the group here, but thought I'd mention in case...
So finally, after about 25 years of work on the Internet, Dave can now get about 2ms of latency between himself and a drummer across town in San Francisco, on fibre, even when his Internet is loaded. The experience is probably better for you too, if you happen to run Linux, FreeBSD, iOS or OSX, (which use fq_codel by default) or are using any of the routers that now incorporate these bufferbloat-fighting algorithms, like OpenWrt, dd-wrt, Google Wi-Fi, eero, ubiquiti, evenroute, netduma, fritzbox and so on.
Ah, hadnt read that one... Well, might be an purchase influencing piece of fact to know what exactly Google is implementing.
Woud be a bit of difference from it having basic fq-codel (baked in Linux kernel for a while), full recent cake (still getting dev improvements) , or having the make-wifi-fast code... (pretty rare and cutting edge) Maybe we could get Dave or Toke, to pop up and comment what he knows?
Can someone confirm that Google Wifi really does this right? Last I checked, which was a while ago, there was no bufferbloat management. No QoS at all other than prioritizing a single device for a limited time (a few hours max) on demand.