OpenWRT runs on a lot of hardware and its a great way to extend the life of a router past the manufacturers patches as well as gain a lot of capabilities. I wouldn't buy a commercial router that wasn't supported by OpenWRT now.
https://openwrt.org/voting/2025-02-12-openwrt-two
Otherwise this router from GL.iNet has OpenWRT preinstalled, Wifi 7, 5x2.5G:
If you want plain unassuming looking hardware get dedicated wifi access points and place them all over the building. There are plenty of those shaped liked big smoke detectors.
If you want single device there are also quite a few trash can shaped home routers.
And they don't look fugly.
It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.
You have any docs on how to set these up? I believe a firmware change is required.
That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and all this equipment and software is now totally unsupported by cisco so don't run PCI transactions at home... I'd also avoid running their captive portal or some of their other weird features...
Actually setting it up is a bit of a chore but it is a full featured "enterprise" (cough) AP management system with all the knobs and twiddles you could ask for.
It's really only a good idea if you don't value your time (like me) or if you have a sprawling plaster house where you want to have lots of cheap access points instead of a couple super fast ones.
Lastly, for better or worse, I haven't been able to make my kid's switch 2 work on the network.
I bought it in anticipation of the Nintendo DS having WiFi capabilities, which I had never heard of before (I was like 13 or 14 then). Had to convince my parents to get broadband internet too.
[1]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/967954/beamforming-expl...
But it's probably easier / cheaper to get maximum coverage at larger distances from a single AP using a big array of sticking out antennae, and that's what a normal home user is going to want.
I guess they think consumers need them to look like this crap.
This lends itself to a spider like design with just a ton of antennas sticking out of a box, or a trash can with the antennas hidden inside around the outside edge.
Do you have other ideas for how to lay it out?
https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_be3_media
https://eero.com/shop/eero-pro-7
https://www.asus.com/us/networking-iot-servers/whole-home-me...
Another setup is circular or semicircular. I suppose it allows for a more uniform directional diagram across the entire 360°, because a straight phased array has harder time emitting sideways.
I have two old Amplifi HD units in wireless backhaul mesh that I’d like to upgrade
T-T. Any update on the timeframe (and presumably also I would expect the expected price to be solidly in the mid to high 300s at this point)?
But Israeli, no can't find that. Sure you didn't confuse it with some other company?
They have a tiny Hong Kong office that handles marketing as well as a US office for technical support, but the entirety of engineering and manufacturing is in Shenzhen and Chengdu.
Because they provide a hosted site-to-site VPN service they are obligated to hold a B13 license. One of the conditions of which is the ability for the Chinese government to request access to devices worldwide.
Is there any closed-sourced firmware that exceeds OpenWRT performance on the same level of hardware?
I think that some proprietary firmware may have hardware optimizations that aren’t possible in a community-developed environment.
You can get a Wifi 7 device and 2x2.5GBps with Wifi 7 support already with the Asus BT8 and a few other devices. Asus's bootloader firmware flasher will take the initial OpenWRT image so its really quite simple to get going.
Fot example from my ISP I can have two options for PPPoE connection, first is legacy IPv4 only but lacks IPv6, second is IPv4 but behind CGNAT and with modern IPv6. With OpenWRT, I am able to make two PPPoE connection over the same wire and have the best of both worlds.
I would really love to see something like this with just 10 sfp cages, no switching all routed interfaces. A real open source alternative to mikrotik.
LinkSys got sued to release the firmware as it was GPL linked. This dump got modified to make the WRT54G way more powerful than LinkSys ever planned but they got to sell the hardware for years more than would have been expected at the time.
A mainstream hardware company releasing a specific product SKU to support third party firmware really sounds crazy from the perspective of the current market where a substantial portion of the value in selling hardware is supposed to come from subscriptions and surveillance.
Despite this, I could expect 3-5 people to hunt me down at PyCon when I was running the wireless to tell me that I had misconfigured the wifi because it was set to low power. More reports of that than reports of wifi not working, IIRC. ;-)
(I was running the wireless because the people we paid do to the wifi would just set up one or two APs and crank the power)
Only if your clients are competent at roaming.
Been using OpnSense for about 8 years now though... it's just been the best option for me, I use separate commercial AP.
I used a pair to provide Internet access at a Customer's construction site back in 2010. Cell phone hotspot wasn't a thing for me yet. We took a pair of WRT54Gs, configured one as a WiFi client, the other as a bog-standard router/AP, connected the LAN from the client to the WAN on the router/AP, pur a directional antenna onto the "client", and pointed it down the road toward a big business who offered free WiFi for Customers. We leeched off that until the real Internet service got installed. (It was a restaurant and we ate there at least once so we were Customers, right? >smile<)
---
They don't often offer inexpensive, deliberately-hackable units like the WRT54GL, I think, because of support costs.
And by "support costs," I don't mean that it was expensive to hold users' hands while they installed custom firmware -- that's never been a service that has been provided.
Instead, I mean that there are people who start goofing with this stuff and run out of skill when hacking close-ish to the metal on this kind of hardware. They don't know how to get themselves out of a jam and unbrick their device.
So they find a way to lie their way into getting an RMA and get the device replaced under warranty, and that's expensive for companies to deal with.
(Those people fucking suck.)
I just received my OpenWrt One because I’m tired of dealing with the questionable quality of most routers.
And I don’t feel like resurrecting my old PC that I used as a router for a while. I stopped doing that because it’s loud. Pretty sure the power supply fan is about to fly off.
But Qualcomm WiFi pci card with giant antenna in a dirt cheap PC running ancient Ubuntu and a simple hostapd setup is so far the most reliable WiFi router I’ve ever had. I hope openwrt one is even better :-)
The learning curve is a little steeper than more consumer stuff but it is by no means beyond a person who is capable of using OpenWRT and the docs and forum support are better than 99.9% of open source projects I have seen over the past 25 years.
So that's 10 kWh/mo for the PC vs 4 kWh/mo for the OpenWrt One.
It was the most incredibly hassle free router I've ever had.
Hopefully, the OpenWrt One is like that. But if not, I'm going to go back to killing the planet with my loud ass beater PC.
I don't think you're quite right on this, or at least you're imagining using something inappropriate when the comparison here involves buying something new right? So it's not "OpenWrt One" vs "whatever you happen to have in your closet" but "OpenWrt One (~$110-130)" vs "whatever can be bought used for $110-130, if you have nothing appropriate". And while they won't go to near-zero like some ARM stuff might, idle power for PCs improved a ton after around the 2013 era. There are lots and lots of small systems available for equivalent prices on Ebay or the like made since then (like Intel NUCs or various other mini PCs) that will idle around 4-10W. Like to take something in the same price range as this OpenWrt One, I regularly see 7th gen era NUCs going for <$140. An i5-7260U will have single threaded performance about the same as the MediaTek in this unit and multi-thread close, but will also generally have 8-16 GB of RAM and often a 250-500GB NVMe drive as well. It'll probably have only one native ethernet, but USB or TB adapters work fine with Linux & FreeBSD at this point.
There's definitely a question of values and exactly what you're trying to focus on, but there are a lot of niceties in having lots of RAM on tap and extremely standard fallbacks to interface with a system, back it up, etc.
>or an OpenWrt One which will possibly also have newer, faster WiFi standards (WiFi 6)
If you want an AIO style device that's definitely a consideration, though again USB WiFi dongles are a thing too. But regardless of router choice, for someone considering going beyond what their ISP offers at all I think it's usually well worth spending the $50-80 to get a dedicated wireless access point. It'll make a major difference in real world performance in most spaces I've seen to just physically have a unit in an ideal spot (on a ceiling or high up on a wall, away from metal). Aesthetically the clean disks or rectangles those tend to have also blend well and mean that various boxes can be tucked away. And of course you get to upgrade networking bits separately from your router.
Anyway, definitely good there are multiple approaches, this is an area of life where people can have very different needs driven by very different physical environments and "stakeholders" (like significant others). But I think OPNsense (or other bog-standard-PC FOSS alternatives like VyOS) can be competitive even in TCO, depending on how much value you place on pushing your networking stack and what else you have going on (like solar power).
Beside the potential performance and environmental issues the other big downsides tend to include firmware availability - either because download from the site requires a login on the vendor's site or, increasingly commonly, the gear has hit LDOS and images just aren't posted. Obviously there are other "unofficial" places for such images, but the risk/legality are a whole other (potentially serious) question.
There's an additional issue mapping the requirements of home networking to enterprise gear: Ethernet switches are lousy firewalls (little or no NAT, primitive built-in security, DLNA/mDNS and friends aren't really sane options, etc). Finally, even at "1/5" the price the gear may still be quite a bit more expensive than other options. And if it's not expensive, it's usually because nobody wants it any more because of the issues mentioned above (being near- or beyond- LDOS).
FWIW this is from someone who literally built a commercial-class machine room in his house with dedicated AC, subpanels, commercial UPS, etc for data center class Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Infiniband switching as well as carrier-grade routers and still runs "enterprise" grade WLAN and switching and can lay hands on as much as I could reasonably want without too much drama or cost... Going down this road can absolutely be amazing if you either have a.) the background to properly source and run the hardware/software or b.) have a driving desire to learn how to do so or c.) have some very atypical requirements for home networking. Otherwise it tends to not be something to be done lightly.
My latest 3 home routers have been mikrotik, mikrotik and juniper.
And the Juniper is still in there, just running as a switch. The old juniper srx sucks at uPNP but is otherwise still a fantastic router if I wanted to swap back to it.
Middle tier mikrotik took a power surge and lost 50% of its ports. It still routed just enough for me to get a replacement.
Latest tik is doing great.
I dont see what the One offers me at all tbh.
OpenWRT is very good, but the installation and upgrades are not easy. There is a zoo of images for different hardware, installation options and tools. It has to run on small devices, so there are limitations. The documentation on Wiki is scattered and could be improved.
I had to search forums for weeks for a custom package installation for my router. Right now I have been trying to upgrade to the latest version via LUCI for a while, and it stucks. Probably have to wait for few weeks, go through CLI and maybe search forums again.
I just thought I am paying a hefty time price for a bit more expensive x86 mini pc and AP.
It's been included in all suitable default image configurations starting with OpenWrt release 25.12.
I do run OpenWrt on my x86-based router, on my AP, and even on my managed switches, and have no regrets.
Previous OpenWrt releases at least as far back as 21.02 could be equipped with the same degree of ASU support by installing a single package (luci-app-attendedsysupgrade) and its dependencies.
The solution is to use image-builder and bake your config into the image.
Mmm, no. Unexpected downtime for infrastructure is godawful... just ask Windows Home users.
OpenWRT has a "Click a button to upgrade" thing, just like just about every consumer/prosumer-grade equipment does. [0] It also has a command-line tool that one can use to automate upgrades, for environments where the phrase "production grade" is actually an important thing to think about. [1]
[0] <https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/attended.sy...> [2]
[1] <https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/sysupgrade....> [2]
[2] Those documents mention that you need to install some things to get operator-initiated upgrades. As of March, the button to click is installed by default, and the CLI tool is installed on systems that have enough disk space for it. [3]
[3] <https://openwrt.org/releases/25.12/notes-25.12.0#integration...>
...which I tried doing, a week or so ago, for a minor point release update within the 25.12.x series. And then the router went out to lunch and didn't come back.
Getting it going again wasn't so bad as such things go. My router has a huge advantage here in that it's a Raspberry Pi 4, so it's easy to remove/replace/re-do the flash device and start over.
(Except: I get all out of sorts when I need to do Internet stuff to fix my Internet connection while that Internet connection is absent.)
I think I wasted $100,000 in salary for $100 more in device cost, in setting up an OpenWRT router.
Apart from installation and upgrades, the OS itself is nice, very flexible and capable.
I've got other options for routing hardware and software (of course I do), but I generally keeping using OpenWRT. Looking back, it seems like I've had it around in some form or other in active use for about 20 years so far.
Part of what keeps it around is the flexibility and the home-network-centric hack-value. I mean, this whole thing grew out of a shell injection exploit on a Linksys WRT54G. :)
Anyway, it can keep whatever counts as a slow WAN connection today feeling responsive and quick with cake SQM, even while loaded heavy with traffic and users. It's nice in that way, even though enterprise types don't seem to be interested in that kind of thing at all.
I could take a nice Juniper router home from work to use instead and it would absolutely trounce the packet-forwarding performance of my cheap OpenWRT box...while also doing nothing at all to make my home-gamer WAN limitations more tolerable.
So OpenWRT is still my answer, with the warts and upgrade woes and all.
Yes, it's a possibility, but if you want to tinker, I think a plain Linux distro like Debian is better. Turning it into a router is literally a couple of kernel parameters and a few iptables rules to set up NAT. Nowadays that's less than fives minutes of work with Claude.
This buys you much better performance and hardware compatibility relative to a BSD system, as well as lower resource usage and attack surface (no GUI or other unnecessary additions). WiFi support on BSD is bad, but on Linux you can use hostapd and almost immediately get an access point for free. And of course Linux is also better if you intend to run other stuff on the same hardware.
I suppose it comes down to what you said - "if you intend to run other stuff on the same hardware." Is it a good idea to run all sorts of extra stuff on your literal firewall/router? And if you did, I'd assume using a hypervisor is safer anyway? That way you can have the GUI and reliability of OPNsense but have a Linux distro beside it.
You also said that Linux has much better performance vs BSD, which seems rather far fetched. Got any data for that?
One other thing: OPNsense comes with a ton of helpful rules to eliminate bot traffic, allow IPv6, different NATs, VLANS, etc which you'd have to add manually. Not the end of the world, but worth considering.
I don't see any reason not to. I run dozens on services, both bare metal and containerized (Podman) on my router/firewall. It doubles as an all-purpose home server with plenty of headroom to spare. It's just a computer that sits at the edge of my network, and running services meant to be exposed to the Internet on it is natural.
> You also said that Linux has much better performance vs BSD, which seems rather far fetched. Got any data for that?
I should have worded this more carefully. What tends to happen is that BSD has worse (or no) drivers, that's when BSD's performance can noticeably degrade vs. Linux. From memory, people online were reporting issues with Realtek chips. With Intel NICs, the routing performance should be broadly equivalent .
I moved from pfSense to OpenWRT due to the really poor IPv6 support in pfSense. I don't use the AP capability either. How are things in OPNSense these days?
Particular pain points from pfSense was that it published global IP as DNS address to LAN clients and no way around it, so connectivity broke every time prefix changed, and no real support for specifying prefix-less firewall rules or similar, so couldn't really expose anything via IPv6 without pain.
1GB is a ton of RAM for this kind of application. :) What do you anticipate needing more for?
I don't use it for my APs, but that is mostly because I already had 3 TP-Link routers setup as dumb APs using OpenWrt that have been working great. If I did it again, I'd buy OpenWrt Ones though. Although Deco mesh kits I've used have worked exceptionally well, and have become my recommendation for friends/family that don't want to do things like run arbitrary packages on their router/APs.
If you just want a good WiFi router or access point, unless you need something cannot do (e.g. WiFi 7 or 10 Gbit/s Ethernet), and if want to spend minimal time messing around with routers today and in the future, just get this one.
After getting this, I see no reason to ever buy any closed-source router again.
No need to learn/remember any other Router config either. It's just all OpenWRT, always looks the same, always works the same. Setting up a new one takes me 2 minutes max.
The recent OpenWRT update also brought the one feature the project was most sorely missing: A simple "Download and install latest firmware" button in the device UI.
Now they just need to add an unattended-upgrades option and I never have to log in again after initial setup.
The single best wifi reference I've found to date.
This answers so many questions that I had but never had the true desire to research every niche WiFi term.
There are too many settings. Feels like Gimp (vs paintbrush). But once figured out, it works well.
I would love to be able to whitelist which devices are allowed to access the internet during night time hours.
There is a plugin marketplace that provides more features, like ad-blocking. I haven't played with those yet, so I cannot vouch for them.
Looking at one of these when TP-link stops patching my Wifi. https://www.toptonpc.com/product/2x10g-sfp-solid-firewall-mi....
Just excellent, some pretty smart people in the Openwrt forum as well if you have problems.
Outside of home-labs, it's rare for me to see any devices connected to the LAN side of a wireless router these days, and more than 1 (i.e. the non-portable device that is closest to the router) is exceedingly rare.
I would assume every gaming desktop computer would be? I actually assumed every desktop would be...
[edit]
If it matters, my mom no longer has a desktop (she uses a docked laptop now), but it is true of the docking station and was true of her previous desktop.
It'd be handy for me: The fastest WAN pipe I can get is less than a gigabit while my LAN is still gigabit. I can't be the only person with this situation, wherein: If anything, then the 2.5-gig port is overkill.
I don't have any direct interest in the wifi radio that the box includes (I already have Mikrotik APs that I like just fine), except to configure it as a failover station-mode interface to use with a phone hotspot when the DOCSIS connection is on the fritz.
...which doesn't happen often at all, but it's annoying when it does happen. It's nice to be able to work around problems like that with OpenWRT.
It ran pretty well for me as a travel router I cobbled together from a Raspberry Pi and Netgear A7500 USB dongle for a stay in a short-term rental where the infrastructure network was shared with other units. More recently I have been trialing their CM5-based model with Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5GbE PoE for use as primary home Wi-Fi.
1: https://www.supernetworks.org 2: https://www.supernetworks.org/security-labs.html
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/et...
Quite a few of the modules went out without their eeprom programmed correctly, and all of them appear to be plagued by quite mediocre performance from (alleged) inadequate RF shielding on the card.
It looks like they've revised the design, but it's peeved off quite a few of the Banana Pi/Sinovoip customers who have bought them with the intention of using it as a router/ap with their R4. (It's dual-PCIe fingers with unique spacing and requires out of spec PCIe voltages, so it's only practically usable with a BPi R4.)
At the very least, the customers using them as wired-only routers are likely to be having a slightly better experience.
I wish it had more ethernet ports but I've managed to live with that. I'd be up for buying an OpenWrt Two as a backup or to replace this if it has even one more LAN jack.
I imagine that using an ASIC is way more cost efficient vs using a CPU.
After some time though, I eventually moved over to using OpenBSD directly. My small brain has a much better understanding of all the moving parts compared to that of OpenWrt :P
Suddenly I want to put every IPS device into dumb bridge mode, and run my own damn router.
7gig WAN is widely available residentially at a reasonable cost.