Recommended most stable hardware?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hey all,

I really love all the features OpenWRT offers and would not want to miss them! Besides providing WiFi to my home, I use VLANs for Guest WiFi, site to site wireguard connections and more with it. For that I use an TP-Link Archer C7 (v2).

Yet I keep having issues with it. Years ago there were already issues that got fixed later. However, even with the latest version I still experience issues a few times per month or so: WiFi completely disappears (connection gets lost, SSID no longer visible) which seems random as well as today the whole device apparently crashed (when it recovered uptime was like 2 minutes).

Since I have people working from home here it gets even more annoying for them and I am also running low on patience after all these years.

Hence I am looking at providing redundancy and adding another device where people can roam between automatically if the current Archer has issues again.

What is the most stable hardware for OpenWRT? Does not have to be a super recent model and I do not need WiFi 6 (should make it cheaper anyway).
Minimum flash: 16 MB
Minimum RAM: 128 MB (my current device has these values, hence the minimum).
WiFi 5 GHz with 1750 Mbit minimum besides 2.4 GHz.
Just like the current device I would hook it up to ethernet and provide WiFi from there.
OpenWRT stability is the most important thing, however.

Afaik my internet router (German Fritzbox) has no explicit 802.11r option, hence I am looking at a 2nd openwrt device for smoothless roaming.
I look forward to your opinions.

Thanks,
Landorin

2

https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi
probably type dot in revision field and ax in 2.4 field, all are stable, more memory and flash - more service life, USB port - more functions, more LAN ports - no need for switch in future (at least plan one vacant over present usage), >gigabit WAN port - again longer lifespan.
Also check service life of vendor firmware, you may enjoy that for warranty period.

3

Thank you.

After checking several options I will give the TP Link AX23 a go. Wanted to go for the Banana Pi BPI R3 first but found several open issues on github which are too severe to ignore, too bad.

4

Seems to be popular here.

Have you searched in OpenWRT to check on it?

5

The Banana Pi came up as one choices for me thanks to the hardware table you linked. The issues I found via google and ended up on github. Apparently they seem to affect stability a lot so I figured this will not improve my situation.

In fact, now that I got the AX23 here I might even keep it on stock OEM as main AP for everyone and use the older Archer C7 with OpenWRT for all other stuff I want to play with and not really as main WiFi supplier anymore.
edit: turned out the AX23 is a bad choice for me with OEM firmware. In router mode (default) the device and its client have to be on a completely different subnet (and probably double NAT). In AP mode which eliminates these issues the guest WiFi is not isolated from the main network however! I don't get it why they even add such an option then (officially, to allow people sharing their wifi without sharing their main credentials lol). This is not even mentioned in the web UI. From what I found, this is the case for certain other (or all?) TP link wifi routers as well. I will have to think now to switch it to Openwrt after all or return it.

Here are the banana github links:

6

I have two TP-Link EAP615 access points since Oct 2022
Besides performing incremental (stable) version upgrades, I had to reboot a device once inbetween because of a freeze

7

Hey, just came back here to say I decided for the AX-23 from TP-Link. I have that running since months and did not experience any kind of issues anymore and no more need for reboots. No bandwidth issue, no disconnect issue, nothing, be it an Apple or non-Apple device. Whether this is related to the fact it does not have ath79 as target I cannot tell but I specifically looked for a device using something different. Quite happy with my choice and OpenWRT runs flawlessly on it as far as I can tell. Was really cheap when I bought it as used device and has WiFi6 as a bonus (not that I really need it).

8

In addition: the combo RPi CM4 + DFRobot Routerboard is rock stable
(100+ days uptime)