What are as of today the STABLE (not working so so) supported SOCs?
To be honest I'm a little puzzled
All cheap routers are using MTK 7620 / 7621 / 7628 that i've seen unreliable.
By chance I have one (actually 2 ZBT) chinese unit MT7620 of course that has some custom firmware based on a SDK form 2014 that's 10 years ago . I tried with latest images and i feel they are not 100% right on wireless side.
I am wondering what are the SOCs to avoid and what are those that just work.
Years ago it was simple : TP-Link WNDR series 1042 / 1043 / 740 / 841 / 842 all were pretty good and served me well but all of them were running Atheros that was just working.
What is the recomended todays cheap router SOC.? I mean not router but Soc that is rock solid and working. I need them to be rock solid not fast , and of course CHEAP .
I was trying with ZBT but... that MT7620 seems not properly supported.
Honestly i would prefer an router with some proprietary drivers that just work. I feel that Mediatek if they woul release some proprietary drivers that just work they woould sell a lot more.
On the other hand manufacturesrs would never have 20 proiducs with same soc diffent pricing diffrent cases and 3x the price.
So what is the soc to go to : 2.4 an 5ghz . Not Ax as it becomes pretty expensive.
If you are willing to elaborate on why you think this is the case, we can investigate and see if it's a configuration problem or if it's an issue with the code. Just saying that you "feel they are not 100% right" doesn't help anyone.
The average person buying wireless routers doesn't even know these things have an SoC that runs Linux. Even if proprietary drivers lead to better performance/stability/features/etc. a vast majority of people buying these things aren't going to attribute it to drivers. And they're not going to make it part of their marketing, because most buyers doesn't know what a wireless driver is or does.
The main problem with cheap MediaTek ac dual band routers is not the SoC, but driver compatibility with the 5 GHz chip. Avoid the MT7612 and M7613. A MT7615 is much better.
Still almost all low end cheap routers on the market are built around MTK. Most probably there are MT76xx routers that work .
Rock solid means that it doesn't lock up every day and if you put a decent watchdog maybe it reboots once a month and in the meantime you don't have loss of connectivity or loss of wireless power or loss of wireless throughput.
Of course its open source and what developers did in these 20 years it's awsome , even beyond any expectation . I've been using since AA and it's been a great opportunity.
What I feel is that now is more complicated to get a reliable router that doesn't break the bank.
I strongly believe that except very pasionate few vast majority will not buy 100 USD router just to flash OpenWrt as it may be very expensive toy for them .
For that reason what would be today the equivalent of Atheros of 10 years ago.
It seems that in a funny way that has become the MT7620 former Ralink as it tis still everywhere in the low end and even up to 2T2R AC 5Ghz in the form of 7621+ smth.
IPQ806x on an R7800 for example is rock solid, I have a bunch of them with uptimes up to 400 days. And I know there are no issues with loads of different client hw.
It usually takes a while until a fw gets to this point. Newer HW is more complex and has to handle even more different clients. And nowadays it gets more difficult, because you have a lot of functionality moved inside binary radio firmware. By the time a consumer device gets stable you can't by a device with such a chipset/radio:-)
I don't know a great deal about the FOSS status of this or that driver/SoC combination but this looks like a decent reference on that topic:
FWIW re: OpenWRT & stable compatibility, I am running OpenWRT on a Unifi AP 6-Lite and it is rock-solid stable, both in daily usage (subjectively) and when reviewing OpenWRT log files on the WAP (no excess disconnect/reconnect events, etc.)
Both Wifi & upper-layer TCP connections (for example, SSH sessions) stay connected indefinitely (uptimes of weeks and more) without any issues.
I have not yet had a chance to do comprehensive performance testing with iperf3 under controlled circumstances. I have heard anectodally that performance (max data throughput) under OpenWRT on this particular hardware isn't quite as good as with the Unifi closed-source firmware. I'm not bothered by a possible ?? ~15-20% (??) performance hit in exchange for the superior configurability & security options offered by OpenWRT. (I.e. ability to shut off all unwanted services, to use modern SSH2 protocols for web + shell administrative access, supporting modern key types like ec25519-sk, etc.)
Not really, in old days WiFi standard is far below cable ethernet so at that time people who want high speed will connect with cable, only a limited number of devices will be on WiFi. Nowadays WiFi speed is a lot faster so that people can save some time on running ethernet cables, and more mobile devices + IoTs also requires stronger and faster WiFi router/AP.
Paying > $100 for router? A lot more people willing to pay for that now when compared to old days.