Suggest a good access point

Hi my ISP router has very very very bad wifi. But ethernet is gigabit and runs fine.
I'd like to buy a less-then-100€ AP to make wifi working (2,4 + 5 Ghz possibly). To be used with openwrt, of course.
Can you please suggest one or two? Cheaper is better =)

Thanks

The Fritz!Box 4040 and the LinkSys EA8300 are very good and affordable devices (only Firtz!Box 4040).

https://openwrt.org/toh/avm/avm_fritz_box_4040

https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/linksys_ea8300

“Cheaper” is relative. Do you have a budget in mind?

Where are you located? There are many good deals on solid used devices in various parts of the world.

I'm in Italy, I can buy from anywhere in the world. China is usually a good place to buy affordable device.

Thank you for replying, but these are routers (too big and too many ports). I just need an AP: 1 ethernet port (gigabit) and wifi (2.4 and 5ghz is better).

Unifi UAP-AC, most likely the LR. The Pro doesn't seem worth the substantial extra cost.

Hi all, pretty new here.

I'm interested in the very same topic. I have a very good working TPlink WA901ND (not openwrt yet cause warnings about memory), but I need to query mac address table from snmp. I can query snmp from the device, but alas no mac address table. So my search lead me here.

Hope I'm not crashing in on the thread. I just need a decent AP that I can snmp :slight_smile:

GL.Inet GL-B1300 (ipq4018) comes to mind, most of the reason why it usually isn't on my radar is exactly because it's more of an AP, than a router (only 2+1 ethernet ports).

But it is a router, sorry I'm pretty new to openwrt, I'm guessing it's pretty doable to set it up as an AP. But will I be able to query mac address table from snmp?

I suppose I owe you to explain the setup: I'll be using it for presence detection on home assistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/snmp/

Home assistant is just a 'smart home' for personal use you can run on a raspberry pi, quite happy with it.

Technically there isn't really a difference between a router and an AP, see https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dumbap for details about the setup. Regardless of the device in question, the default setup with OpenWrt will always be a router, so you'll need to switch it to AP functionality either way.

Among the ipq40xx devices supported, the following seem to match the 'AP' category:

and these probably fall more into the extender category (power plug part of the device):

I have not checked the device pages for suitability(!), so check for yourself if your potential candidates ship with >=256 MB RAM (required!) and are reasonably easy to flash OpenWrt from the OEM firmware.

1 Like

Thanks for the info, I'll look into it!

If all else fails, I'll probably load openwrt onto my tplink and see what I can get from that.

Kind Regards

I just bought a AVM Repeater 1200 but I am not very happy with it:

  1. Installation of openwrt requires a lot of steps and is quite complicated ompared to other devices. Thus I would not suggest this device to be used by beginners
  2. The original firmware supports a reset button, OpenWRT does not. If you mess up your configuration and are locked out you have bricked your router
  3. It seems that VLANs are not supported by this device. At least I was not able to get it running. All my other OpenWRT devices did not have any issues regarding VLANs.

I have two very cheap (~33€) Netgear EX3700 which were very easy to setup (initial flashing) and have hardware reset button and also support VLANs. Unfortunately they only have 100MBit network and other hardware capability is also quite limited compared to the AVM 1200.

The procedures don't look too bad to me

Yes, it's not as easy as uploading an image from the OEM GUI, but it doesn't involve opening the device or soldering - and while the steps need some attention to follow, I don't see anything complex about them either. Obviously you should check the corresponding device pages/ install step beforehand, to evaluate if you feel up to it - as it varies widely between devices (and sometimes the most interesting devices aren't that easy to handle).

I would expect the WPS (connect) button to invoke the failsafe boot (missing buttons are often not too hard to get working, they'll just need some tinkering to find the correct GPIO). In the worst case, I'd expect the initial installation steps to be able to recover the 1200 from almost any config messup, obviously it's not as comfortable as the failsafe environment, but it should be able to unbrick the device as well.

ipq40xx' swconfig switch driver has a couple of quirks in this regard, but it should still be possible.

1 Like

I tried it but it ended up that the router does not download the image from the TFTP server in step 4/5.
Luckily this was only a test and I never lost access to my device.

The AVM 1200 does not involve a switch it only has a eth0. The linked threads are all about switch config which is not needed here.