You do you.
Good luck.
Hi there.
I am looking for a budget OpenWRT router in order to use SQM and adblock. I am stuck between the Xiaomi Mi 4A Gigabit Edition and this router, and I am leaning towards the C7 because it has greater number of ports and a much nicer way to flash in general.
How stable are the builds? Would the hardware be able to manage ~8-9 devices? I have an 35/8 VDSL connection but it might become an 100/10 soon, so that is also something to consider. I wonder if the C7 would be able to meet my use case. Thanks.
For a 100/10 connection, a C7 should be good. Back when I used one as my "everything" box, i coukd expect to set 110-120mbits in SQM before the C7 got saturated, on wifi, going thru ether I could get it up to 140 or so. This on a 300/30 connection, running cake SQM, etc. Thats about your limits there.
Slight difference note, I had the v2 anf v3 versions, which ran 720mhz. Some later versions use a slightly different main chip, and maybe a bit faster cpu speed. Just picked up a referb A7 (almost the same) for cheap, its doing 775mhz.
Another note, the c7 family has a bit of wifi issues, with occasional dropouts, theyve gotten better on recent revisions, but not perfect yet.
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You may also consider a TP-Link Archer C6 v3. It has the same chipset as the Xiaomi Mi 4A Gigabit (MediaTek mt7621), but it is better in the sense it has one additional LAN port and it is also much easier to flash OpenWrt (and to recover) when compared with the Xiaomi.
When compared with C7, the C6v3 has a better CPU that will handle better other applications you may install in the future (also with SQM it will perform better but for your internet speeds it will not make a difference).
Despite being a 2x2 WiFi (C7 is a 3x3), C6v3 will have a better throughput in Wi-Fi compared to C7 (important when copying files from one device to another in your local Wi-Fi). See this topic for more information about this matters.
On the other hand, the C7 has an USB port which lacks on the C6v3. C7 may also have a slight edge in terms of WiFi signal strength.
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Thanks a lot. The C7 will get delivered today, and I will install OpenWRT once I test the stability with the TP-Link's firmware.
Used to install custom ROM's back in early 2010's, and OpenWRT+this router made me feel the same thrill of customisation. I am thankful to the community.
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I just switched to a 1000/50 internet connection (mainly for the upload, and that part works just fine), but am now running into some limitations with my A7v5... Based on this thread, I should be able to get at least twice of my current download performance.
Specifically, on 21.02.3, with SQM disabled, flow offloading enabled, and using non-ct smallbuffer ath10k packages, I'm getting around 400 Mbps wired, and 200 Mbps wireless (laptop right next to router).
RAM usage seems perfectly fine (~35% available), CPU does spike but top still shows over 20% idle under the loads I mentioned. So I'm a bit confused as to where the bottleneck could be?
Thanks, that's indeed an excellent post, but not really the issue here as far as I can see? I'm not expecting to hit anywhere near gigabit performance. However:
a) quite a few posts across the forums (not just this thread) have data points for 600+ wired / 300+ wireless with C7/A7, which I'm not able to reach, and
b) my A7v5 appears to stall before hitting its RAM/CPU limitations (which is otherwise always shown to be the culprit), so it's unclear to me what exactly is throttling the throughput
The archer c7 is waaay too slow for that, its genuine performance is ~175-200 MBit/s, only software flow-offloading can push it in the vicinity of 400 MBit/s, while you need 1000/50 MBit/s, which is firmly in RPi4, r4s, x86_64 territory.
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Again, I'm well aware I won't get anywhere near 1000/50 with my A7. But I should be able to get 300+ wireless, which I'm falling well short of.
(even though there's 10-20% CPU idle headroom, even though I have software offloading enabled, SQM off, etc)
Sorry for the obvious comments below, but anyway here you go just in case.
For 300+ wireless you should use 5Ghz at 80Mhz and without obstacles in the signal path.
Your client must also support 80Mhz channels.
Hey, it's me again guys. I got the Archer C7 set up today from the OpenWRT wiki, and I installed SQM+DNS HTTPS Proxy. I am using it solely as a 2.4ghz router. I have no intent of setting up a mesh network right now.
I am currently happy with it but would like to know if I should bother with installing the firmwares in the original post.
Also, is there anything I should do, for example in the settings, to increase security and stability of the router? Right now, I set up a cron job to restart the router every five days.
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Update: Link to 22.03.0-rc4 is there.
fyi: First post updated with 22.03.0-rc.5
fyi: First post updated with 22.03.0-rc.6
Sorry, somewhat off-topic... There seems to be a typo, regarding the github-openwrt-presence/scripts/ath10k-ct-watchdog/wrtwatchdog installation instructions contained within the script. It says on line 22:
bash "/root/wrtwatchdog start"
but this returns
bash: /root/wrtwatchdog start: No such file or directory
But running it with the quotation mark after watchdog it seems to work fine.
/root/wrtwatchdog: Creating new service instance ...
Keep up the good work!
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Thanks, I've corrected line 22, you were right :).
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Please remember: Use vim or WinSCP to edit /etc/config/wireless in the "radio1" (2.4 GHz) WiFi section and turn LDPC off when using the hardware model TP-Link Archer C7v2. This will improve stability and latency a lot. Here's a sample of the config section: https://github.com/Catfriend1/openwrt-presence/blob/master/scripts/wifimgr/radio-iface/20-tplink-archer-c7v5-radio1
(I've added this instruction to the first post.)
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@Catfriend1 I haven't updated my dumb C7 v2 APs for a while now and was wondering if there are still issues with the stock 22.03 images regarding wifi stability?
Also what is it with LDPC that is wrong on the v2 series?