The most powerful router with EASY installation

Hello everyone, everything good ? I am a user who understands very little about openwrt and would like recommendations of the most powerful dualband and gigabit routers on the market, but with one condition, that the installation be as easy as possible, ie only install the LEDE 18.06 firmware by page of the router. No commands, linux, ftp, or whatever. Just plug and install, same as my tp link wr841n, wr740n, etc. No matter price. Thanks so much if you can help. I have seen several powerful routers, but with very complicated installation for a lay user.

Note: To return to stock firmware, you should also only install the original firmware of the router. The same way it is with tp link wr841n / wr740n etc. Extremely easy installation.

Note2 : sorry the bad english. =D

If I'm not mistaken, you'll help me confirm. The Linksys WRT1900AC just plug and install the LEDE through the router page, and to go back just install the original router firmware?

Not sure about going back, but yes it should be easy to install if I remember correctly, I did it more than a year ago

Did you install it from the normal router web page?

I can't say for sure, was too long ago. Unfortunately website isn't that explicit about it: https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt_ac_series#flashing_firmware

Hopefully someone else can confirm more authoritatively.

The WRT1900AC (and WRT3200ACM) allow you to flash OpenWrt 18.06 directly from the manufacturer firmware. I haven't had any issues thus far (I have a WRT3200ACM but they are similar).

Both of these routers have a dual partition system, so if you do screw something up you can get back to the OEM firmware easily.

There will be some setup after you install OpenWrt, but you can do it all though the GUI at 192.168.1.1 in your browser. Note that after installing OpenWrt you will have to connect directly to Ethernet to configure it (until you enable wireless).

Thanks for confirming, I'm going to edit the wiki to say "flash firmware from factory upgrade page" or something similar.

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Thanks @AjkayAlan and @dlakelan, both WRT1900AC and WRT3200ACM are excellent routers, and apparently they are very easy to install and configure. I'll leave the topic open for more suggestions. I am curious about the Netgear, R7000, R7800 if they are facéis also to install.

The r7800 is easy to install, but it requires flashing via a tftp client, meaning it doesn't strictly qualify your initial checklist.

The very similar nbg6817 could be another contender, but easy installation only became possible after the 18.06.x release (so current master snapshots, downgrading is possible though), which means the flash-OpenWrt-from-the-OEM-firmware option will be part of 19.01.

The Netgear r7000 comes with Broadcom BCM4360 wlan, which is not supported (and probably never will be).
(Yes, b43 technically does have some basic support for BCM4360, but limited to 54 MBit/s and not very mature - you really don't want this).

Thanks for the @slh feedback, I really did not mind the broadcom chipsets that are not 100% compatible, you're right, it's hard to openwrt. I have a very basic notion about tftp and linux do not know if it would be enough to handle the R7800, I would have to search more, it is a medium expensive router, I am afraid to do something wrong. = X

Both Netgear r7800 and ZyXEL NBG6817 are basically unbrickable (well, you can, but you have to try rather hard), both allow going back and forth to the the OEM firmware via tftp. If you're unsure, the nbg6817 might be a little easier, provided you feel comfortable installing a current snapshot from the OEM firmware upgrade interface and then downgrading to 18.06.1 via ssh and sysupgrade), but neither this nor going through tftp would be 'difficult'.

Going back to the stock firmware will require tftp for both devices (well, the nbg6817 comes with a dual-boot setup, so you can go back to the OEM firmware until you overwrite it (flashing alternates between partitions, writing to the currently not booted one)).

It sounds like the current "best" way to get stable OpenWrt on an nbg6817 is to flash the snapshot using the OEM web page, and then downgrade to stable. It's two steps, but both of them are GUI and should be relatively pain-free yes?

Yes, but snapshots don't contain a webinterface (luci), which means the second step needs ssh and sysupgrade, rather than being accessible from a webinterface. That will obviously become a one-step graphical installation starting with 19.01.0.

So basically, install https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/ipq806x/generic/openwrt-ipq806x-zyxel_nbg6817-squashfs-factory.bin from the OEM webinterface, then connect to the router via ssh (e.g. PuTTY) using root@192.168.1.1 and then downgrade to 18.06.1:

cd /tmp/
wget https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/18.06.1/targets/ipq806x/generic/openwrt-18.06.1-ipq806x-zyxel_nbg6817-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin
sysupgrade -n /tmp/openwrt-18.06.1-ipq806x-zyxel_nbg6817-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin

(wget assumes the nbg6817 is connected to your old router via its WAN interface, so it can get access to the internet via DHCP; an alternative would be using scp (pscp) to copy it to the router's /tmp/ directory).

While this technically doesn't qualify the requested "no-ssh" requirement with 18.06.x yet (but it will with 19.01.0), it's relatively easy and almost fail safe.

Oh my God, I was understanding everything perfectly well until I got to the wget, scp and haha ​​/ tmp directory. This zyxel is a great router (1.7 ghz), but the installation of wrt1900 / 3200 is much easier for laypeople, although the processor is weaker 1.3 ghz, they are still excellent routers.

It looks like I found the router I was looking for, Linksys WRT3200ACM. Extremely powerful hardware, support native to OPENWRT / DD-WRT, good, finally, it remains to know if the wireless of this router has a good reach in 2.4 and 5 ghz. But I believe it will be the one I will buy. It's a machine. If anyone knows one that is more powerful and with the same ease of installation can comment. I'll leave the topic open for another time. Thanks to those who have helped so far. = DDDDD

If power is important to you definitely consider an x86 box. The zotac ci327 has been tested by at least one person on this board and works well, much faster than either devices you are considering. You will have to add an external AP such as the tp link eap series but those will generally perform better anyway. Up front cost is more but over time costs can be less as you need less replacements and upgrades.

I personally wouldn't go back. My wrt1900acs is just a fancy multi vlan AP.

Installation is mainly just copying the image to a SATA flash drive before screwing it into the case.

The two 1.8 ghz cores from wrt3200acm are enough to use SQM Cake for games. I need a router myself, I already researched box, there are some very interesting, banana pi 2, for example. But it's definitely not for lay users. So the topic 'Powerful router with easy installation'. But I thank you all very much for all feedback.

It depends very much on your wan speed. Up to 250Mbps you should be ok with the wrt. More than that and I would definitely move to x86.

+1 for the wrt3200acm

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R7800 is otherwise easy, but like said above, in the initial install from the OEM firmware you need to trigger the TFTP recovery flash mode at boot. But even then you can use TFTP tools with GUI from Windows, e.t. tftpd64. The TFTP mode is well documented and works well:

After the initial install, sysupgrading R7800 in master and 18.06 builds works ok from the Openwrt GUI.

WRT3200ACM also works ok and flashing is easy, like said. And there is the dual firmware mode for fallback. (In case you want to return to the OEM firmware, you can flash that with sysupgrade --force option from the Openwrt command line.)