Hi community. I have a number of new mobile devices that use WiFi6 and I would like to upgrade my OW hardware from a Netgear R7800 to something supported by OpenWrt that also supports both WiFi6 and WPA3/personal. Another requirement is robust flash recovery in case something goes bad with the firmware, I want to be able to recover with tftp or something equally easy. Is there anything people would recommend to me or is WiFi6 just too new right now?
WiFi 6 is too new. Even when the 20 release arrives it likely won't support any wifi6 devices.
There are promising ones out there, but IMHO we're looking at Christmas 2021 for support to be good, not just there with bugs. Save your money and wait for a nice wifi6e device next year instead.
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Too early. The new routers have improved hardware but the software (open source and OEM) is not there yet to any significant difference over wifi5 devices. December 2021 is a good forecast. Wifi6’s key feature is going the way of mu-mimo....it’s not really making a difference at the home consumer level.
“ My conclusion at this point is that OFDMA produces no discernable benefit for the average consumer.”
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ASUS or Huawei.
You'd need to be more specific, rather than just throwing manufacturer names[0] into the room. While there are exceptions which might be supportable (ipq807x based ones), ASUS and Huawei mostly seem to preferably push non-supported SOCs/ wireless solutions into their 802.11ax portfolio (Broadcom in case of ASUS, HiSilicon Hi5651L in case of Huawei) - neither of which are likely to see any OpenWrt support at all.
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[0] device manufacturers are rarely exclusive to one SOC/ wireless OEM, they do pick different solutions for different target markets and price regions.
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i've been buying chinese routers due to how difficult it is to find & flash things. I'd love someone to mention a couple of wifi6 models that are monumentally easy to flash with oWRT