Hello all,
I have some problems with my Netgear R7800. Not sure yet if it is a hardware or software problem (Just updated to 22.03 and monitoring)
Meanwhile I was checking for a good replacement. But the Belkin RT3200, Linksys E8450, WRT32X, WRT3200 are all not available anymore, here in the Netherlands. What is a good replacement that is currently still for sale?
Regards,
Bert
While a bit pricy and a small challenge to switch to "stock" OpenWrt the turris omnia still is a decent router. TOS, its "native" OpenWrt derivative OS, while lagging behind, offers nice things like automatic updates. It sports an SFP cage which will allow a single 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port, and the wifi cards (currently one ath10K and one ath9K) are replaceable (currently some users experiment with a WiFi6 replacement card for one of the two radios). Biggest gripe about TOS really is that the current stable version is based on OpenWrt 19, but it is easy to switch to the current stabilizing version (based on OpenWrt21) or even current snapshot builds (but with the risk of less stability).
All in all still a nice device.
Amazon UK has RT3200 and ships at least to Finland (but based on yesterday's forum discussion, not to Sweden...).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Belkin-Wireless-Dual-Band-Streaming-Parental/dp/B08L4PJKKB
Netgear XR500 is the direct succesor for R7800. (double flash, no eSata)
Thanks, The RT3200 is also shipping to the Netherlands, so that could be a cheap fallback. It must be one of the last RT3200's on stock in Europe:-)
The Netgear XR500 looks also like a good alternative, bit pricier, but so was the R7800. Is it just as well supported by Openwrt?
It shares the same build recipe with R7800 but with double flash.
Identical support. (But I am not doing a community build for it )
See the commit:
R7800 was split into a large common recipe for R7800+XR500, plus small device specific parts defining the flash partitions for both (and eSata for R7800)
Just read this topic, whatever you do, run away from WRT32X or 3200ACM 
@brjhaverkamp WAX206 might interest you as well, but the SoC is a downgrade (I think) compared to the R7800 (but you get 802.11ax and one 2,5 Gbps port). There's one for sale second hand on Tweakers.
I've ordered a WAX202 myself, but that will be used as part of a wireless bridge and AP, not for routing.
The 206 isn't supported though, at least not yet.
Grabbed one myself, managed to get OS access, and booted an initramfs, but i lack the skills to create a working image.
The big issue is the Realtek 2.5gbe chip, it's not selectable under the MT SoC.
I have no issues at all using WRT3200ACMs with 5GHz Wifi, sure it doesn't do WPA3 but performance is very good. I'd be careful about 11ax since support/performance appears to be below 11ac in general.
according to WRT1900ACS - WiFi stopped working for Android phones after upgrade to OpenWrt 22.03.0 - #10 by intgr the real issue's mixed mode.
might not be comparable though, apples and bananas.
Where are you getting that idea from? The speeds I'm hitting are well over what I got with AC. AX210 client, MT7915 radio.
Looking at the RT3200 thread
There is a whole thread about ax vs ac.
In particular, speeds seem to drop strongly at certain distance and across 1 wall with worse performance as compared to ac mode (both stock and OpenWRT) or ax mode using stock firmware.
This is perfectly expected. At least to everyone who has studied wireless communications basics in college or university. The amount of data you can ideally transfer over air depends on two things only, and these are the width of the frequency band and the signal-to-noise ratio.
What these standards have been doing is to define wider frequency bands (40 MHz or 80 MHz instead of the initial 20 MHz) and modulations and modes that can take advantage of bigger signal-to-noise ratios. One way to have a bigger S/N ratio is to increase the power transmitted. The other, more common one is to be closer to the transmitter with fewer obstacles in between.
The higher the frequency band (5 GHz versus 2.4 GHz) the easier it is to allocate wide channels. The less commonly used it is, the better chance you have of it being free of noise. This is one of the advantages of 5 GHz over 2.4 GHz. But then, the higher the frequency, the more sensitive the signal is to obstacles and attenuation. Air is basically a very thin obstacle in this respect.
But far bigger part of the attenuation is simply due to growing distance. Either your antenna would look like a spotlight or a satellite dish and need to be aimed straight at your phone or laptop, or the radio waves are transmitted not like a beam, at least not in most wireless LAN technologies, but like an expanding sphere. Double the distance and you quadruple the surface area.
When I first studied these, I was surprised that technology isn't really the liming factor anymore. The laws of physics are. So my approach to wireless communications has been for a while now to not expect much and be happy with whatever I get.
Then there are measurable health effects from even a minuscule amount of microwave radiation, but that's a whole another story.
You may be right about the laws of physics, but proper code, software and hardware still plays a role. In the thread I mentioned, it was shown that there are currently severe problems with a particular chipset (mt7915 4x4 non-dbdc) and some specific clients (mostly apple devices) and it has been shown that this can be fixed with different code. Also, my mt7915 dbdc 2t2r device does not have these problems. So all i wanted to mention here is that these problems exist and everybody who wants to buy one of these mt7915 devices should take care. Mediatek employees and some core maintainers of OpenWrt have failed to respond to the proposed fixes for months now and honestly I am a little annoyed it is like that. I do not like the fix as it removes some capabilities that worked before, but this 0 communication with the community is just annoying. I for instance am not going to buy an mt7915 non-dbdc device until this problem is fixed.
Edit: Seems like a fix was finally merged. I have not tested it yet though.
I have marked the important fact in bold text. Please read again. To add more detail for clarification: the bug is only present in AX mode. AC mode on the same MT7915 radio to AX capable station combination works well. So it's not in any way related to basic signal transmission physics over air.
Please don't assume people here just don't understand basic signal transmission physics limitations for over one year in a discussion thread with over 500 messages.
While you are spot on about the physics, 802.11ac and 802.11ax 'cheat' the physics in additional ways, in the form of Mu-MIMO and beamforming - modulating the different spatial streams and kind of treating the whole antenna array as kind of a matrix antenna to focus transmission to (a limited number of-) individual clients. The laws of physics still apply, but in general 802.11ac and 802.11ax can still push more data/ faster over the distance than their predecessors (assuming same frequencies and roughly similar channel bandwidth). Furthermore modern radios have become more sensitive (to cope with higher modulations) to extract the signal from the noise floor.