Honestly, I am getting tired of the bufferbloat. My current router is killing me and any small upload is causing on average 300-500ms of latency spikes. (20ms unloaded)
Help, I have a budget of around 100-150 USD.
Have a look at ToH? sort by supported by 23.05.5, mt76 platform, greater than 16MiB storage, greater than 128M ram. Then find local deals? (Plus read the flashing instructions to make sure you're comfortable with them....)
MT76 / filogic platform?
IMO stretch the budget for a filogic platform. (i.e. mt7981+)
But if you want a cheap solution, even MT7621 should do SQM for 150Mbps?
I would recommend x86 router, separate (managed) switch, separate AP if you have it in the budget, size/noise and power consumption requirements.
There's another thread in terms of long term support. Basically anything in snapshot now should be in 24.10. Having something with a mainline release will make things easier. But if you don't want to have issues in the interim until 24.10 is released, find something that is supported by 23.05.5 and will be supported in 24.10. Basically don't get something that has 8MiB of storage or less than 128M of ram. Preferably much more ram and much more storage if you want any big packages....
Best thing is to give the following:
- Approximate location( i.e. continent / country etc) so people can advise on deals local to your area.
- Can you do used market / ebay? Do you need BNIB / retail store, amazon.com etc?
- Noise
- how much wireless range / speeds do you need, or are you primarily caring about wired performance.
- mechanical
- sizing
- heat load
- mounting requirements,
- temperature range,( in the sun, condensing environment, freezing environment,)
- Power consumption limit (i.e. are you limited by price of electricity, or upfront cost....)
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Thanks for your initial reply, I am now looking into your recommendations.
- UK/Europe
- I am fine with eBay used or even new stuff on Amazon.
- Wi-Fi is least of my concern, as long as it has an AP. I will be using Ethernet on my main devices.
- Don't need big range, don't care much about speeds as long as reasonable for mobile scrolling.
- No size restrictions, cold environment, no other limits other than upfront cost.
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I looked over the ToH and I'm currently eyeing the Asus RT-AX59U as it's about in my price range on Amazon. Is there any realistic reasoning to get this over something like the RT-AX53U for my scenario? Could save some money.
Looks like rt-ax59u has an unofficial easy installation, .trx file?
rt-ax53u looks like you need a USB serial adapter, i.e. opening it up (voiding warranty in your location maybe?) to do it over TFTP. Or you need to install over SSH by mtd-write if you're comfortable with that.....
IMO if you're going for mt7621 and don't care about wireless performance and used/new. Try finding a used mt7621 wifi 5 router haha =) For example Netgear R6220....
But yeah highly recommend getting the much newer ARM platform with the much better CPU's.
Maybe someone can chime in regarding any other local deals haha.
If power consumption isn't a concern I'd go R6220 or cheapest used wifi 5/6 AP openwrt capable AP, cheapest openwrt capable switch. (JG922A, JG921A, JG920A?) and then cheapest gigabit haswell or newer desktop I could find.
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Hmm yeah my only concern was that with a slower CPU I wouldn't be able to SQM 150mbps. I am unaware what sort of CPU power is needed for that. Otherwise I would really just buy the netgear as suggested, is there precedent that it can do SQM at these speeds?
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Yeah. Only reason I recommended mt7621 as a worst case if you wanted to go cheap is that it caps out at 150Mbps SQM performance from what I've read.
I have mt7621 targets myself but I use them as bridged AP's or routers for <60Mbit only.
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Why necessarily stick with a MediaTek chipset?
Netgear R7800 (or XR500) can handle 300/150 Mbps with sqm enabled. Without sqm and by using an NSS build, we are talking at least double these numbers.
R7800 has a long history of good support with many senior OpenWrt members here in the forum owning the device, and you can find a good used one off eBay for $/€/£ 40-50. It is almost identical to the “newer” Netgear XR500 which has just larger flash size (again sold off eBay as used in the same price range). Both routers are based on the Qualcomm ipq806x chipset but the wifi is quite older (wifi5 - not wifi 6 or 7).
If sqm is a must, then hardware acceleration should be forgotten, so no point to stick to a MediaTek platform per se.
Finally, no switch is needed imo if there isn’t any need for say 5+ lan devices or sqm at 1Gbps. A switch should be considered in a mini-pc-like setup (i.e. RPi 5 for gigabit sqm+ router), which is an overkill for a 150 Mbps speed range.
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You made your statement as a question. Hahaha TL;DR is as follows but I also made a longer discussion in a hidden tab if you want my reasoning.
I'm no fanboy, if that qualcomm platform meets the needs better and is within budget go for it.
Thanks for the suggestion regarding the R7800 as well as the local pricing info. It's ~115USD equivalent on the used market where I am. If it's within budget I say why not. Certainly looks much better than an MT7621 platform haha. (Except if that an R6220 is also wifi 5 and is like half the price I can see on eBay, which would also give budget towards a managed switch or a separate router....)
Further discussion
I'm no fanboy, if that qualcomm platform meets the needs better and is within budget go for it.
Thanks for the suggestion regarding the R7800. If it's on the used market, within budget I say why not. Certainly looks much better than an MT7621 platform haha.
As an aside, Huawei 7050 or 5030 look good eventually? Or you required something cool like FortiAP 421E which has dual PoE inputs go for it =) Used the R7800 is like 115 USD where I am.
I will admit I have no experience with newer Qualcomm. I've finally seen some qualcomm platform stuff come down in price and available on the used market. Plus I really want to get a fortiAP 421E to experiment with.
I'd probably be able to recommend stuff when I have experience with them and they are dirt cheap on the used market =P
Ath9k AP's, atheros, QCA9531 stuff for cheap AP's? go for it =P
As an aside, Mediatek has a recent record of of having stuff on github, public self hosted repositories with version control logs as well as releasing public datasheets and reference manuals. Qualcomm not as much? My experience with things not having public documentation, source code and reference manuals as an electrical engineer means I find not being able to get recent qualcomm, realtek datasheet, programming manuals frustrating.
Personally, I've not had good experiences with add in card ath10k AP's on my fortiwifi 50E-2R. Nor with my limited experience with the IPQ4k stuff either...
I don't talk Qualcomm platforms as I don't have recent experience with most wifi 5/6 Qualcomm stuff. But yeah everything should be reasonably covered with a search for just 23.05.5 stuff and read the wiki for installation and any caveats.
I'm not going to say don't get a Qualcomm platform. But i'm not going to say get one either =P That is for people like yourself which can vouch for them? =P
Hardware acceleration is good if you ever want to repurpose something and you want closer to line rate internal NAT or wired to wireless performance?
You're right. Separate switch is a nice to have even in a small scenario. Even if it's not a mini pc setup, you won't power cycle your network switch when you do maintenance on your router or access point. Similarly if you separate the WAP and the router.
As an aside regarding wired only routers I have experience with:
If you need a separate wired router with 5+ ports the Fortinet stuff or the cisco MX64/MX65 if you can handle flashing it is awesome. Dual cortex A9's @1.2GHz are probably good enough for SQM at these speeds as they're stronger than MT7621? I have both MX65 and a fortinet marvell armada 385 platform, but haven't tested SQM/software NAT so wouldn't have numbers for you.
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The GL.iNet GL-MT6000 is easy to flash and fits your budget
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GL-MT6000 here running sqm with a gigabit connection with no issues.
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Thank you all for your recommendations and time, I have ended up purchasing a Netgear R7800 simply because I found one from eBay on the cheap and it has a long history of support + ease of flashing in this community. I was happy to spend much less than my original budget as this is only a temporary solution to my network.
Thanks to @evs @pstlr78 (I can only tag 2 per post but also thanks to ed8 and Hoodwinks too)
I will update the post with results from waveform when it arrives.
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Note that with the r7800 you might want to try simplest_tbf.qos/fq_codel as its CPU seems cake-unfriendly... not sure whether that already triggers at 150 Mbps. @hnyman do you remember by chance the max the r7800 can shape with cake?
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@Redacted Good choice. Congrats.
FYI hnyman has a pretty nice build here which I am using for 3-4 years, maybe more.
Just remember to choose fq_codel as queueing discipline and simple.qos as script, as @moeller0 said above, because ipq806x uses too much cpu when using cake/piece_of_cake and will reduce your final throughput.
Take a look at this reply for sqm stats in R7800.
My latest run at waveform below on a 150/150 FTTP line, with sqm set at 135/135 on purpose (-10% of nominal speed)
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pstlr78 already linked my year-ago results, but direct quote:
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Software flow offloading is disabled.
I'm sure GL-MT6000 will give the same result.
That waveform is kinda crazy. I doubt it's due to your setup but your jitter is quite bad. Also all good thanks for the recommendation but I'm still waiting delivery on my Netgear.
When I saw that I immediately thought apple hardware with safari... these roughly equally spaced latency bands (in this example at ~216 in all three phases of the test) are IMHO caused by some safari internals (maybe garbage collection). Try with chrome or firefox on the same machine and I bet these bands will be gone...
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You are right, it is Safari.
In Firefox the result is much better.
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As expected... please note that browsers are complex and powerful environments, but they are not good clean measurement environments especially not at high transfer rates...