New to the forum, so hopefully I 'm posting in the right place. Now the question: I 'm looking to buy a Netgear WNDR3700v4 or v5. I 'm planning to use it purely as an AP with a couple of SSIDs/VLANs. With regards to the VLANs aspect I 'm reading this in the wiki (which I believe it refers to v4):
Switch Ports (for VLANs)
There seems to be an issue with the internal switch. I've observed this with all kinds of laptops and OS's on a dozen access points. The problem is that sometimes traffic with a destination of a wifi client will no longer be routed to it, leading to a non-working wifi client. My advice would be to uncheck 'learning and aging' under Network → Switch in LUCI, although this effectively may turn your switch into a hub. See https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/13612
Is this still valid and how does it affect what I want to achieve?
Also, how well is the Mediatek based v5 supported nowadays? I 'm reading in the wiki that the radios in that versions re not very reliable.
I'm not sure about the issue you mentioned, but looking at the Wiki shows that V4 has a significantly larger flash than V5 https://openwrt.org/toh/netgear/wndr3700
I imagine that V4 is excluded form the list because it's not commercially available in stores anymore (but I can't be sure there isn't another reason). I would have to choose between the 2, I would sacrifice the difference in CPU for the big difference in FLA size (unless I have a CPU demanding tasks).
If I may ask, why would you have to choose that model? I mean you could get other routers in the same price range with similar specs minus the puzzle of the wireless issue.
Hi mhegab. Thanks for the response. Reason for the particualr unit is because I can find it cheap from ebay, etc Others that I 'm looking include the usual suspects, eg TP-Link Archer C5/C7, TL-WDR4300, etc I am also very keen on a Meraki MR16 or MR24 or something from Buffalo (but that would require DD-WRT and I don't like the release model they have with no stable versions and the fact that Broadcom is not FLOSS friendly).
As I said whatever it's going to be I just wanna use it as an AP behind pfSense. Need something to be dirt cheap and reliable and do VLANs for SSIDs without any hassles. Right now I 'm using a Mikrotik hAP lite TC (generally fine, but there's a particular spot in the flat that has problems getting signal plus the onboard switch is weird to configure with VLANs or not the switch itself, but rather Mikrotik's software layer). No need for wifi extenders, AC speeds, MU-MIMO and so on, I just want something little bit stronger to complement my current setup.