Possibility of installing OpenWrt on new Netgear Nighthawk RAXE500 (AXE11000)

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

I just bought and setup a new Nighthawk RAXE500 tri-band router on my network. I have CenturyLink 1Gbps ↑↓ Fiber internet. My main goal in installing OpenWRT on my router, besides the many benefits is to setup a VPN client on the router to protect my entire network.

I thought the router I bought would be compatible, but looking through the hardware tables I did not find a release for my specific model. With that said I did find a mention of my device in a OpenWRT file bcm4908 on GitHub. Can anyone tell me if this is doable?

OpenWRT bcm4908 on GitHub

openwrt-Makefile-at-v21-02-2-·-openwrt-openwrt-·-GitHub

2

Broadcom is usually a dead end, especially if you need fully working wifi.

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3

Without WiFi it might work otherwise BIG NO.

4

Even if you'd have an image (and it looks like OpenWrt might) that doesn't mean wireless would work. I haven't seen a Broadcom AX driver for recent kernels I'm the wild - at least none with the right licensing that would allow use in OpenWrt.

5

I see. I did not realize. Thank you all for the info.

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6

You could consider returning the router if still possible and look for one that's fully supported by OpenWrt. Keep in mind though the OEM firmware often comes with proprietary hardware acceleration to achieve higher routing throughput, so to maintain the same speeds with OpenWrt - especially with the kind of speeds you got - you might need to look at splitting up your routing and AP duties.

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