I figured that having only 1 device would consume much less than having 3.
but if your calculations are right, then you're right.
Power consumption of modern devices is not really predictable, it varies widely. It's very much possible to have 'bad' all-in-one devices with ~30 watts idle power, compared to a 'good' 3-device setup with an x86_64 router at ~6 watts, managed switch at ~4-8 watts and an AP at ~6 watts. You can't avoid measuring it - and values might vary a lot with 10GBe ports and other settings that might depend on the surrounding environment. Only 'old' (mips-) routers had relatively predictable -stable- power consumption figures, modern devices have a much more dynamic power profile (they might need more margins under certain stress situations, but still power down considerably for normal operation - and modern USB ports need to reserve at least 0.9A per port (and in practice they'll have to deal with load spikes up to ~2.2A (HDDs spinning up, SSDs are power hungry as well), that are margins the router will never use itself, but needs to provide to cope with your addon USB devices.
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It's not quite state of the art re WiFi standards but I recently purchased a GL.iNet GL-MT6000 Flint2 from Amazon. £135 now but I got it for £115 on offer. Solid metal chassis, 8GiB flash, 1GiB RAM, quad-core ARMv8 running in 64-bit mode, one 2.5Gbps Ethernet direct to the CPU plus another 2.5Gbps & four 1Gbps via DSA VLAN switch, USB3, one 2.4GHz radio and one 5GHz. Stock firmware is a fancier web UI over OpenWrt which is very nice and still allows you to use secure shell and LuCI if you prefer but I flashed vanilla OpenWrt. You can also boot to its separate net-aware UBoot partition which has a web interface as well, so difficult (but not impossible) to brick. Lots of hardware offload including between the WiFi & Ethernet so CPU is mostly free for other stuff - Apache, Postfix, Asterisk, Docker images etc.
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The Pi5 bundles is more expensive than my NanoPi R6S (which comes with 2 x 2.5GbE + 1 x 1GbE NIC + very nice metal heatsink case)
I bought a 5-year old second hand R7800. It's been flawless for performance of cable/wifi for years now with zero issues. I'd say it's a great option.
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For an access point, the Zyxel NWA50AX Pro seems hard to beat considering that it looks professional (can be mounted to the ceiling without looking like a circus), can be powered via PoE+, and it comes with a serial port (no need to screw open a case).
For a home setup, it's probably overkill, but I might even just buy one for myself as well, if I ever come around to upgrading my network.
The OpenWrt One is probably easier to use, because it already comes with OpenWrt installed.
I didn't benchmark for the use case of hundreds of devices connecting, so my experience is limited.
When connected without setting the txpower in dBm, it doesn't penetrate even one concrete floor, but plaster walls work fine. AFAIK, OpenWrt defaults to conservative values. (Phone does penetrate one wall.)
I see it on US amazon right now for $60. Might have to get another one, just because...
It's not exactly the easiest device to flash but what about quantum/gemtek w1700k?
2gigs ddr4 and 512mb flash with 270mb usable storage for packages and such, 4 stream wifi 7 tri band (2.4/5/6) radios. 2x10Gig + 2x1gig ethernet ports. And the best part is it's $30-$50 on ebay. (generally in USD it's $30 without a psu and $50 with)
Needs to be flashed with the serial port method but Quantum graciously left the serial port pre populated with pins to make it easy for us LoL. If I can successfully flash one I think anyone can. Honestly you get a lot of device for that $30-$50 in the w1700k. Only thing it really lacks is a usb port.
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I bought 2 extra, because of your message. Do you have any suggestions for how to deploy the software bits for those extra devices? It’s not exactly a “fleet”, yet, but still.
Xiaomi AX9000 International 149€ Mi Router AX9000 | Intelligent router for serious gamers
Another even cheaper in 115€ Xiaomi AX9000 GL WiFi6-reititin | Karkkainen.com verkkokauppa
Challenging to flash but offers a lot
