Open router for 300Mbit+ Wifi with cake

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

I recently bought a wrt3200acm and found it cannot do cake at 300mbit. I want cake to keep the latency down as the speed test showed spikes in 100+ ms range. Now I'm curious about trying an mt76 or ath10k device. My candidates are Archer C7, r6220, and r7800.

c7 may not have the power?

@Mushoz mentioned in Cake at 300+MBit on wrt3200acm in 2019 that his mt76 dir-860l is able to shape at around 650-700 mbit (didn't say which SQM), so maybe the r6220 with 128MB RAM is the good enough and cheapest? Or will I regret not paying for a r7800?

1 Like
2

Perhaps over your budget, but at those high speeds, I'd add APU2/4 into my list of considerations.

3

r6220 is single core and probably won't be able to reach those speeds. Cheapest mt7621 device will probably be a Xiaomi MiWiFi 3G or if you don't need WiFi, the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X.

4

Household gigabit fiber connections are beginning to become a problem with existing routers.

I've been thinking about changing my router to eg. Pc Engine APU2 router, which already has a lot more power compared with consumer routers. https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

5

I can confirm the C7 lacks the CPU to do more than 200Mbps.

you need a dual-core (or more) SOC where one core can shape at your target speed.

MT7621 devices will do it. I've tested one on a 300Mbps cable line and get about 250Mbps with Cake enabled.

6

this doesn't seem right. in any case I believe the wrt3200 is the fastest device available short of x86 mini PCs.

what tests are you running that make you think it can't do cake at 300Mbps? I would have guessed it would handle 400 or more.

7

Which device do you use? What's the worst ping you see at http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest ? That test works better in Chrome then Firefox BTW.

8

I'd prefer a device available in Canada/US I can pick up locally or off Amazon instead of importing a Xiaomi and jumping through extra hoops to flash. Are there any alternatives with two physical cores?

9

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest and fast.com. The last test i did was closer to 300, albeit with 10s of ms lag. Maybe it can do 300? I'll test again in the summer when I get gigabit to home.

10

I ended up ordering the r6220, even though it is single core. In case anybody else finds this thread I found a link with the dual core devices. Unfortunately they were mostly not FCC approved, so didn't fit what I wanted. But in case somebody in China finds this here is a good link of all the dual core routers. You can get some very nice ones for cheap from aliexpress!

11

Even better link which shows only dual core devices which are supported by OpenWrt.

12

@dana44: You are correct, the R6220 is a single core CPU. But it supports dual thread. The Linux system shows it with two processors. The CPU is fast enough for many scenarios, you will have a lot of RAM and ROM. Furthermore the hardware support is stable and covers many wireless features like MESH or VLAN support. One of my three routers (which I don't use for new software experiments :wink: ) shows an uptime of 116 days right now running 18.06.2 stock firmware.

You will like the router and picked a good choice :slight_smile:

13

It's not going to be fast enough for Cake at those speeds though, with that same core also doing NAT, firewall, WiFi drivers, etc.