Linksys WRT AC Series vs. Netgear R7800 vs. ZyXEL NBG6817

[19yc93]

Hey,

I'm looking for a new OpenWrt router. Based on your great ToH, I managed to break down my selection to 8 devices:

• Linksys WRT AC Series: WRT1200AC, WRT1900AC V1 and V2, WRT1900ACS, WRT3200ACM, WRT32X
• Netgear R7800
• ZyXEL NBG6817 (Armor Z2)

I live in Germany and I have a 120 Mbit/s internet connection. My needs are:

• stable and open source wireless driver for fast 2.4 and 5 GHz wifi
• high stability and software maturity in general
• VLAN support

Because I'm a linux and open source addicted nerd, there is a big chance that I will not only use the router as AP.
Right now I don't know what exactly I'm planning to do with the router, so I would like to buy a powerful device that can handle some "advanced" stuff in the future.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

[slh]

As long as your WAN speed won't multiply (>>350-400 MBit/s), the r7800 or nbg6817 will do nicely.

[Jamesbe12]

Netgear R7800 will be a lot more stable than marvel (wrt series)

[darksky]

Can't comment on the other two but my R7800 is rock solid. 275 Mbps connection here. Note that SQM for me is CPU limited at speeds around 200 Mbps.

[MagicSimi]

I have a Linksys 3200ACM here. It runs rock stable, current uptime is 157 days (with heavy usage, like serving the home network nfs). Wifi is fast, also I don't a different router to compare it with.

Only downside could be, that the wifi firmware doesn't get any updates anymore.

[Ribeye]

My ZyXEL NBG6817 randomly reboots a lot I wouldn't recommend it. Someone said the snapshot might fix it but I couldn't get it to install right. Hope its fixed in the next stable release.

[kam]

Did you find a resolution to the random reboot problem?
I'm having random reboots and slowdown on my Netgear R6400v1 (running DD-WRT) and have been looking at my options for a new router and running openwrt. Was about to order the NBG6817 until I read this message.

[Ribeye]

Nope still waiting for 19.07.3 which appears to fix the issue for someone else, according to this other thread. Might want to take a read

Zyxel NBG6817 - random restarts

Hi folks, My router is acting weird for few months. Every few days (usualy 7-14) it restarts itself. Last two restarts it wasn't able to boot successfuly. It froze during booting process and I had to powercycle it few times before it started successfuly. Also since last freeze syslog started to show this error : Tue Mar 10 22:29:53 2020 kern.notice kernel: [ 315.354260] EXT4-fs (loop0): error count since last fsck: 38 Tue Mar 10 22:29:53 2020 kern.notice kernel: [ 315.354301] EXT4-fs (loop0…

[slh]

@Ribeye

19.07.3 which appears to fix the issue

No, 19.07.3 will not magically fix the issue in stmmac (and it should affect basically all ipq806x devices, not just the nbg6817) - kernel >= 4.19 will, but that (respectively v5.4) is only in master/ snapshots (~what will become 20.xy.0). A fix might be backported, if the changes that actually helped could be identified (git bisected), but there's been a lot of work on stmmac recently (and ongoing), so taking a lucky guess won't be possible. This would need to be investigated by someone who is affected (I'm using a nbg6817 since early 2017, I've never seen it myself).

[Ribeye]

Oh good to know. Maybe I will go ahead and flash the same version that other guy did then if I can figure out how to get that specific version. Thanks.

[kam]

Did you try flashing the latest snapshot? It seems you may have flashed an old snapshot with broken dependencies.

[Ribeye]

Yes it was the Apr. 1 snapshot when I tried. And I still see people having same issue as of 5 days ago so I am a bit afraid to give it another try...

Luci has dependency of libiwinfo20181126 when installed with opkg

ich have the same issue, current snapshot, updated packages # opkg install luci Installing luci (git-20.099.26404-e9449d9-1) to root... Downloading http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/packages/mipsel_24kc/luci/luci_git-20.099.26404-e9449d9-1_all.ipk Collected errors: * satisfy_dependencies_for: Cannot satisfy the following dependencies for luci: * libiwinfo20181126 * opkg_install_cmd: Cannot install package luci. The latest build of luci is compiled against the latest libiwinfo on …

edit: I finally got a snapshot installed, will update thread if restarting issue is resolved! It usually happened every 2 or 3 days so if I can go 2 weeks without it happening I think I can say its fixed.

[tmomas]

@19yc93 If your problem is solved, please consider marking this topic as [Solved]. See How to mark a topic as [Solved] for a short how-to.

[Ribeye]

@kam

Did you try flashing the latest snapshot? It seems you may have flashed an old snapshot with broken dependencies.

Confirming latest snapshot has seemed to have fixed the issue so far, over 6 days and no crashes which is almost a record for me. If I can get to 2 weeks without a crash I will consider the bug fixed, but so far it is looking VERY VERY good. (I used to crash every 0-2 days minimum).

So, at this point I feel comfortable recommending the NBG6817 IF you are comfortable flashing the dev. snapshot. Otherwise, I would not.

[kam]

That's good news. I ended up getting the R7800, been running flawlessly for 4 days now. Still familiarizing myself with OpenWRT in general - so far so good.