What's your favourite cheap LEDE/OpenWrt device?

I just got a GL.inet MT-300N-V2 with 16/128, for $19.95 from Amazon w/ free shipping, which amazingly arrived in three business days. To my surprise it came with Lede 17.1 preinstalled. So far, so good.

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So, scanning this thread (and a few others) it seems that at present, the best bang for buck for a new device at present are those based on MT7621 (dual core MIPs 880MHz)?

I'm in the UK so the only device widely available without importing from China that uses MT7621 seems to be the Ubiquiti Edgerouter X. It was complex to flash until recently but I see the Wiki has been updated and it's possible to replace the system image using SCP/SSH?

The other target often mentioned is IPQ4018 (quad core 700MHz-ish depending on router model). In the UK this means Fritzbox 4040, Mikrotik HAP ac2 (both a bit complex to flash) or the Zyxel NBG6617 which seems to be flashable from the stock firmware.

Can anyone comment on:

A) Which is superior, 2c4t MT7621 880MHz or the 4c IPQ4018 638MHz (which is the clock speed on the Zyxel NBG6617)? For things like SQM and OpenVPN. I'm not sure how much difference the extra cores and threads make as opposed to the single thread performance?

B) The Edgerouter X is £50 but lacks wireless, and the Zyxel NBG6617 is £75 and has 2x2 AC1300 radios. Which is the better purchase?

My go to for years has been the Archer C7 V2 as it's rock solid on LEDE/OpenWRT. However, the V2s are becoming rare (for a while it was easy to pick them up for £30ish second hand). The Archer C7 is still sold new in the UK for around £70-80, usually V4s, which until OpenWRT 18.06 was on snapshot. However, paying £70-80 for a single core MIPs seems to be a waste of money nowadays given the options above.

I run a very small residential IT support business. In the UK most people are either on BT 10Mbps down/1Mbps up ADSL or 67Mbps down/18Mbps up FTTC VDSL, so an Archer C7 is more than enough, especially in smaller residences. Some people have multiple APs across a larger property, but still at these WAN speeds, so an Archer C7 can still handle this, although I sometimes use the BT Smart Hub 6 in these instances as it's a dual core 1GHz device and seems to hold up OK under load, especially compared to the Home Hub 5 (running stock firmware), which crashed frequently in the same setup.

Other than BT or providers that use BT's infrastructure (Openreach), there's only really Virgin Media which is fibre then coax, with maximum speeds of 300Mbps down and 30Mbps up. Soon-ish BT will roll out G.fast meaning speeds increase to 300Mbps down and 50Mbps up. There are a few small true FTTP residential operators (Hyperoptic for example), but they have very little coverage at the moment.

TL;DR is I'm looking for a rock solid replacement recommendation for a cheap OpenWRT router that is the "new" Archer C7 V2: cheap, widely available in the UK and rock solid for up to 300Mbps down/50Mbps up. For those on higher speeds I guess it's IPQ80xx/Marvell/x86 devices for OpenWRT or the beefier Ubiquiti/Mikrotik gear?

NBG6617 is flash able from stock web gui.
I done 2 of them myself.

Do you have e way to flash OpenWRT on Mikrotik HAP ac2 / RBD52G-5HacD2HnD-TC ?
I have not found any place on the wiki, that mentions this device.

@mortenchristensen Please use this topic only for recommendations of cheap OpenWrt hardware, and not for basic support questions.

If your device is not listed in the Table of Hardware, it it most likely not supported.

I can recommend the Netgear R6220 which is supported since 18.06. It is MT7621 based and has 128MB RAM, 128MB flash (newer versions only 64MB), 802.11ac (up to 867MBps), 802.11n (up to 300MBps), 4 GBps LAN ports, 1 GBps WAN port. Available for ~40-50 EUR. It is worth the price.

OpenWrt is missing flash layouts for newer versions in the 18.06.1 release. The issue has been analysed already and the new flash layouts are available for creating new images:

It is possible to build your own images based on the required changes but I hope that those changes will find their way into future images provided on the OpenWrt website.

B) The Edgerouter X is £50 but lacks wireless, and the Zyxel NBG6617 is £75 and has 2x2 AC1300 radios.

Well, from my point of view, I always look to have dedicated APs inside my network (usually they are CPE routers with bridged WiFi) and dedicated routers with no wifi at the edge.

That way a fatal mistake playing with a wifi box config when drunk at 3am doesn't leave you disconnected for the internet, and a mistake in a routing or firewall config doesn't leave you unable to access your local resources over wifi while you work out what you did wrong.

Often I use identical devices for both roles if I don't need top performance, so in a pinch I can reconfigure one box to do routing OR wifi OR both. (there's a certain re-assurance that comes from having several identical devices to flash up in case you make a mistake or bad config decision - my main reason for using cheaper CPE whenever possible)

I find most cheap CPE (sorry - CPE is customer premises equipment - the free routers the ISPs provide) to be fine for Wifi AP use so cost isn't really an issue if you use common ones bought on Ebay.

For 50 quid I looked at the Edgerouter X myself - my use case is needing relatively fast site-site OpenVPN links, though I obtained a few BT HomeHub 5's instead at a good price so didn't buy a ER-X.

Here's my main point - the lack of wifi on the ER-X wouldn't be a big deal for me - like I say I have plenty of cheaper wifi boxes to spread around.

Also, VPN servers are much less of a problem when there's no NAT or even double-NAT to fight against, so it makes sense for a VPN endpoint (and a fast one at that) to be on the edge of your network. From a security management point of view I also prefer my edge routers to be only running the minimal needed to perform their role, so things like NAS, TFTP, SSH gateways etc I prefer to do inside my network on other boxes.
Just because you can add every service including kitchensinkd to your main router doesn't mean to say it is a good idea. I used to make a lot of errors going mad like that in my early days.

Sorry for slow reply but that's my own philosphy in a nutshell a when it comes to wifi-less devices - FWIW

Using here TPlink 1043 N v5
Works very stable with Lede / OpenWRT 18.06
Except for 1 thing. OPENVPN doesn't give more than 16Mbit (vpn service can go up to 300Mbit)

Are there other cheap routers that supply up to 100Mbit in OPENWRT / OPENVPN / NordVPN ?

For 100 MBit/s of encrypted VPN traffic (and OpenVPN is particularly slow/ demanding for hardware ressources), you need a very beefy router CPU, ideally x86_64 or highend ARM; neither of those are cheap (~200 EUR and more).

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http://www.orangepi.org/OrangePiZeroPlus/
should handle 100mbps openvpn traffic (untested/unconfirmed) but for 15$ + shipping it worth a test

http://espressobin.net/tech-spec/

https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/globalscale/globalscale_espressobin_v5_0_1
Marvell Armada 3700LP (88F3720) dual core ARM Cortex A53 processor up to 1.2GHz
50 $ (1Go) 80 $ (2Go)
3 LAN GB
SATA
1xUSB2
1xUSB3
1xuSD
1xTTL (console) uUSB
GPIO
mPCIe (optional WiFi)
All maintained in Open Source way by Marvell

MVEBU already supported in OpenWRT

I have three TP-Link TL-WR810N units. I think they're ace. The built-in mains plug and power supply means no messing about with USB power cables; just plug it into the wall socket, and go.

I have two which travel with me: one which connects to hotel wireless networks and provides an Ethernet connection and a 5V USB socket so I can power an Edimax 8-port switch, and a second one which connects to it and offers a wireless hotspot to my hotel room. The third one stays at home and acts as an inbound VPN server for out-of-band access to my network in case my main WAN connection drops and I need to interrogate the devices while away from home to find out why.

The 8MB flash is easy to fill up if you're enthusastic with packages, but setting up extroot with a tiny USB stick is trivially easy to do.

I have a GL-MT300N as well as its successor, the imaginatively-named GL-MT300N-V2. I'm eagerly awaiting the release version of the latest OpenWRT for the V2 device. They're slightly more powerful than the TP-Link devices, but have to be powered with a standard micro USB cable, so they're not quite as convenient.

I also, inevitably, have a VoCore2, just because.

They're all good, and all meet different needs, but my favourite is the TP-Link, solely because of the integrated plug and PSU.

Pre-release, with "Estimate Delivery: Late August 2018" https://store.gl-inet.com/pages/slate-gl-ar750s-ext-gigabit-travel-router, presently priced at US $65, so pushing the "cheap" category, but not a lot more than some of the other "travel routers" out there.

Among other "tweaks", the AR750S provides GigE, in contrast to the AR750 with 100BASE-T

They may have pushed me over the edge to buy another router than I don't really need :wink:
(Bah, getting through checkout there's a US $10 shipping charge at this time.)

If anyone owns one of these already, would you PM me?

_Edit: https://openwrt.org/toh/gl-inet/gl-ar750s_
ar71xx: add support for GL.iNet GL-AR750S -- May, 2018

  • Powered by Qualcomm QCA9563 SoC, 775MHz CPU
  • 300Mbps(2.4G) + 433Mbps(5G) high speed Wi-Fi
  • DDR2 128MB RAM
  • Support external MicroSD card storage up to 128GB
  • 16MB Nor flash + 128 Nand flash

https://docs.gl-inet.com/en/3/hardware/ar750s/

100mmX68mmX24mm, 86g (very roughly 4" x 3" x 1")

V2 Mango build: https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/18.06.1/targets/ramips/mt76x8/openwrt-18.06.1-ramips-mt76x8-gl-mt300n-v2-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin

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Huh. Would you look at that? Serves me right for not double-checking; the last time I looked the V2 support was still in development.

Cheers! I'll try it out this weekend.

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Thanks for all the information.

IKEv2/IPSec is that also possible to configure in OpenWRT instead of OPENVPN or do I still need some juicy hardware for a bit better speed?

I assume your seemingly out-of-context post is a follow-on to your previous question

Answered at that point in the thread, it continues to be pretty much "no" -- nothing I have seen in this category of wireless routers in late 2018 has enough CPU power to encrypt more than a couple dozen Mbps with the AES ciphers, or something in the 50-100 Mbps range for the ChaCha20 cipher (such as WireGuard uses). Transport cost of the encrypted packets is minimal by comparison to encryption.

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Currently (as of today) running a TP-Link Archer C7 v2 on a 1Gbps AT&T fiber connection. The router cost me $30 (used).

I'm running a snapshot build compiled by Juppin that includes software flow offloading. This alone more than doubled the router's throughput.

The CPU is overclocked from the stock 720MHz to 1000MHz using the method outlined by Pedro here.

Here's an internet speed test taken earlier this evening. This is from a computer connected via Cat6 to a gigabit switch which is connected to a LAN port on the router. Wifi is slower, averaging under 300mbps. But I'm happy with this ethernet performance at the moment, from a router that didn't set me back much.

30%20PM

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Just did a couple more tests, got 832/732 over ethernet and 373/293 over 802.11ac.

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I need a dual band accespoint for a satellite receiver, which doesn't have wifi. Wifi reception is very bad there, but I would like to use videostreaming.

What could you recommend?

My choice could be the TP-Link Archer C7 AC175.