Main problems with these routers - versions. Vendors often start with some nice chipsets, lots of RAM and storage. And over time, without external change, the internals change, the same model suddenly runs completely different HW with much more limited RAM, storage, etc. It happened to me multiple times that I purchased some device listed on OpenWRT as supported, just to find out that supported was Version 4 and I got Version 5 (not listed at the vendor site, of course) and my device is either not yet supported, or even worse, never will be. So, be careful when checking the device, always also check version.
You are spot on. That's really a big challenge. And unfortunately it drives a lot of people away from OpenWrt because they think OpenWrt is to blame. That's also the main reason why I am so reluctant to do the same video for 2022 - Any time that I "recommend" a router, I have no control what the vendor will do next and potentially steer thousands of people to an unusable device ;-(
Marc, well done sir. 1 brief correction for you. The number of antennas you have one your router or AP governs the maximum speed you can go. So in the case where you have a router with 4 antenna, 2 might be used for 2.4G and 2 for 5G, so 2.4G can only go 300Mbps for 802.11N speeds and AC/AX will max out at just under 450Mbps. The next limiting issues are your devices connecting to the router/AP. If the router/AP has 4 antennas and you phone only has 2, you only get 2 streams of MIMO, hence the 300Mbps on your phone. Last but even more importantly, the farthest device (weakest signal) governs the max speed of the whole network. Since Wi-Fi has built in rate fallback functions to keep client devices connect, all devices connected to the router/AP suffer the same fall back. I recommend you turn off the lower speeds in N, turn off 802.11B completely and add a second wired AP (turn off dhcp service and set it’s address statically). I hope this helps and doesn’t confuse to many out there. Yes, wireless is my professional role.
It is now 2024 and I have found a pretty decent router for OpenWRT, which is quite cheap and works stable, fast and power efficent. The TP-Link Archer AX23. Damned easy to convert to OpenWRT. The only little restriction is the small amount of storage (16/128)
For a budget router I can recommend the Xiaomi 4A Gigabit Edition. I've got mine for 15,99 € at Amazon Warehouse Deals. It only has two regular LAN ports, but the WAN port can be configured to be LAN. Flashing OpenWrt is pretty easy with OpenWRTInvasion.
Here is the thing: I was looking for a router/ap to buy in place of the Archer C7 which is pricey where I live, saw your suggestion, got a Xiaomi 4A Giga for half the price of the C7, flashed OpenWRT and... everything is great! Thank you! May the networking gods smile upon your packets.
@@TheMave95 many thanks. I have a virgin media router and runs at 200mbps speed. If I successfully flushed it with openwrt, should I just plug this with my existing router and daisy chain this with 2 or 3 XIAOMI routers?
Inglés I have seen this video 4 times and learned some things, I did not even know what iperf3 was, but now I can use this great tool, thank you sir for your knowledge.
I think the title should read: "Which WiFi Router is best for OpenWrt in 2021?" since your suggestion appear to be concentrated around WiFi routers. I personally like the Luxul ABR-4500. Nevertheless, your video is very informative. Thank you!
Hi Luke, this request has come up a couple of times. I am a bit uncertain about a follow up. The hardware shortage and limited availability of Wifi6 options makes this a real challenge.
Thanks for the great video series on openwrt. I love it. Going for a 1GB internet connection now, I verified your test results for my 4 tp-link archer. Great. I had to learn that it makes no sense to install iperf3 on a router. But a warning to all, the DIR-3060 I bought after this video IS NOT SUPPORTED by openwrt. Board design seems to differ a lot, and a trial to port got stuck somehow. Just a warning for all others watching. Next trail, will be an arm-based router board. Marc for your device, have you found a usable port?
Hi Andreas, I am using the DIR-2660 firmware on my DIR-3060 and it works great - just I can't use the 3rd radio, but 2 radios are fine for my use case.
I wouldn't have one device doing all those things because if it breaks then the whole thing collapses. Lets say a raspberry pi4 could be your server and router, with a managed switch and an access point for the wifi, using vlans to separate your domains. You can use the managed switch to route your internet modem into the pi4 and all vlan interface on the pi4. Access point will use the vlans with unmanaged interfaces for each network, bridged with the wireless interfaces. All dhcp will be on the pi4 and you can run pihole for your whole network. Plug a couple of large usb3 drives into the pi for backups and media serving. (One armed router).
Hi, many thanks for your feedback - yes, you can scale up/down as much as you want - in a nutshell that's the great thing with Open Source and standards - you can design nearly every infrastructure you like at nearly no additional cost ;-)
I came here as I need to replace my Archer V600 with an OpenWRT or DDWRT router. Leaving the Archer to handle the VDSL only. I see you are recommending a TP-Link. However the reason I am replacing the Archer is that it's wifi is unstable, it's fine for a few weeks, then randomly it drops a handful of device, usually those that can't migrate to other APs due to signal. Reboot the archer, it all works again.
I could not see that happening on the C7. If I remember well the V600 did only have 2.4GHz right ? Alternatively you might want to look for a cheap Mediatek alernative like the Xiaomi Mirouter 4A Gigabit
@@OneMarcFifty Thanks. I was mistaken it's a V900 I'm replacing. I think it suffers from memory corruption with high device count. I bought a WRT3200acm and a Draytech VDSL dedicated modem. At the same time I updated my switches to managed and have been following your other videos for OpenWRT to set up a Guest VLAN properly for wired access (work laptop). Your video on VirtualBox was helpful and allowed me to set it up in a lab and play around. That was after locking myself out of the router a few times playing with VLANs :)
Hey i bought dir 2660 after so many research but did saw your video as the title of video didn't mention any router name😅...i have installed latest openwrt and setup sqm qos (i dont know if i configured it correctly). My connection speed is 150 up and down fiber. The help i need is ,can you make any video for setting sqm qos for fiber network. Im just a noob at these kind of things.
Many thanks for the feedback - I had tagged the video with the product name but RUclips doesn't show it prominently - w/r to SQM - I will do a separate QoS/SQM video very shortly.
Thanks, great video as always! I use a Mirouter 4A Giga that also uses the MediaTek mt7621 and except the 2.4GHz driver it's fantastic. The stability isn't perfect yet, which is why I have a cron job that restarts the router every week. I had some weird stuff happening after 40 days uptime so I thought it might as well reboot every so often to never run into stuff like that, but for just 35€ new it's a steel. Also I think that MU-MIMO is unfortunately not supported in hostapd atm if I'm remembering correctly.
Many thanks for the feedback. I just checked on MU-MIMO and it should be implemented in theory, at least for ath10k and mt7615. I'll double check and test. Maybe hostapd needs some trigger to actually use it...
I bought a second hand WRT1900ACS V2 for €25. It handles gigabit speed with SQM Cake enabled, without software or hardware offloading enabled. Also a good recommendation. The wifi does not support DFS though, but I don't use it myself.
Yes - that's definitely a great way to go at the moment given the difficult situation on the hardware market. Older x86 hardware (broken Laptop, Thin client or the like) definitely beat everything else in terms of CPU.
Congratulations. Do a review of openwrt and mikrotik and also ubiquiti. Mainly about your installation 911,922, groove metal and others. Also mention using with nanosation ac m5, thank you very much.
Excellent video, I was just looking for some sort of performance test (old routers refurbished with Openwrt :P ) and didn't know about the iPerf tool. Thanks
Many thanks for the feedback! I have been thinking of maybe doing a Toolbox video on iperf3 and another one on htop. Very much like Webmin and Ventoy those are just little helpers I don’t want to miss ;-)
I asked the same question below on one of your old O.wrt videos would like to repeat here. I am sure if a competent it person such as yourself chooses O.Wrt over pfsense there is for sure a valid and solid reason. Kindly share it with us. Thanks again
Copy of the origina answer: "Well, you know - like so often in IT you use what you know - I know Linux and I know OpenWrt - just happened so 😉 I have just never felt the need for anything else. I am tempted to believe that it must be the same for someone who uses pfsense. I do have it on my list though 😉"
Hi, it seams that a lot of people are using the Nighthawk R7800 with OpenWrt - and - seriously - it's a great device - Ath10K wifi etc... The reason that I chose those devices to compare was to make people aware of possibilities on how to measure throughput and CPU usage and also show the hardware offloading possibilities for MEdiatek ;-)
It depends so much on the hardware being used - the native / stock firmware very often makes use of those but with the free drivers we are very often limited....
I am running wrt3200acm with OpenWRT OS for 5 years so I would like to share my thoughts on it. I bough it because vendor claimed: "Open source ready with OpenWrt and DD-WRT" It is clearly bullshit from their side because of mwlwifi driver no-development/bugs. If somebody claims it is open source ready I would expect that is means open source including drivers. However it is great router and I would like to highligh Dual Firmware Flashing feature. From my POV it is MUST have feature for WRT upgrades. For example I have upgraded OS and girlfriend complained about something is not working. So I rolled up to known good configuration in 30 seconds! When I am alone at home I can continue with changing and troubleshooting. Who has experience with girlfriend did not have internet on her phone known what that means. Next router I will buy will be definitely with OpenWRT OS however I will triple check that wifi driver (or any other drivers) on that device is decent sort (definitely not Marvell).
Very interesting video even for those like me who have been using Openwrt since Asus WL500gP. BTW I still have a C7 as a spare an a 100Mbps connection at home
Many thanks for the feedback! I still have my C7's in a box - I will probably use them to build an 802.11s mesh for one of the next Wi-Fi videos and then pull out the ath10K cards in order to build my own router on X86 ;-) ruclips.net/channel/UCG5Ph9Mm6UEQLJJ-kGIC2AQ
You explained the subject pretty well ! Can you make videos on following topics : 1) Does getting dedicated Access point hardware necessary? 2) PFsense vs OpenWRT
Hi, ive been researching a bit and heres what ive found: 1) getting a dedicated hardware access point is not necessary for most people and just adds unnecessary complexity. Also most of the time they are more expensive than an old router thats put into AP mode 2) pfsense is most of the time ROUTER only and has no wifi capabilities, so an AP is required if you are going to flash something with pfsense. However, pfsense is being phased out with opnsense as there is some controversy with pfsense. meanwhile, openwrt keeps the wifi capabilities of the router.
Hi, many thanks for your comments and feedback. Yes, 90% of the Wi-fi users presumably will never need a dedicated / separate Access point. Unless you have a) a larger area to cover or b) you are interested in DIY and want to learn how to build the stuff yourself or c) you realize that your device saturates on CPU etc. in which case separating router (OpenWrt, RouterOS, PFSense, OPNSense) and Access point (OpenWrt) makes total sense ;-)
The era of variant Ar71xx chipsets is end, it was lasted for so long because Internet growth isn't as fast as computer speed, there's no point having multi cores cpu on a router when people can only get or afford 10mbps connection, most newer openwrt firmware now focusing on mediatek and I'm glad it's shifting, the wifi performance is still bad in general but at least we get better wired performance. 64MB ram is almost standard now which is sad, and at least 16MB ROM, unfortunately company like TPLINK makes progress even harder, they still producing more cheap routers like wr820n/844n with only 2MB ROM they knew that people are still going to buy these routers. Thank you marc for this awesome comparison.
Many thanks for the feedback! I am glad it helped. I remember when I discovered the problem I was so disappointed and was about to throw the device out - glad I kept it ;-)
Thanks very much. You mentioned in the video that you will leave the commands to get WRT3200ACM WIFI working in the description. I think you forgot to include it. Would be kind enough to let me know what those commands where. I am currently having issues with WIFI on this router, everything else is working. I know you also mentioned to go back to older version. Just that I have done enough setup of other things that I just cannot undo them all at the moment. I have another WIFI router that is currently doing my WIFI.
Ooops - my bad - in a nutshell, on the command line you can do (XX being your country code): uci set wireless.radio0.country='XX' uci set wireless.radio1.country='XX' uci set wireless.radio2.disabled='1' uci commit Alternatively set the country on each Wifi in the "advanced tab" and disable the radio2
I use the Linksys E8450, currently it only supports snapshot releases, but its working perfectly with sysupgrade and everything from what I can tell. The only issue I am having with it is 160MHz does not work.
Can the Linksys not do it or is it maybe your clients not being able to connect to 160 MHz? I’ve had issues with my iPhone connecting to 160 MHz in the past…
@@OneMarcFifty I can select 160, LUCI says its working, but no device in my home can see it. I live in a very rural area, so there are no other access points. It wont even show up on any SDR I have setup. Not even my desktop with an intel AX card sees. Stock firmware has it locked at a max of 80Mhz so I assume the card on the router is incapable of it or something. Very odd.
@@FeralFoxDX i’ve had the same with my iphone and the D-Link so I assumed my iphone can just not handle it. But I would need to test with another router as Wifi client in order to verify.
@@OneMarcFifty I see you have purchased the Belkin branded model in some of your newer videos. I forgot to mention until now that I was able to successfully enable 160MHz by changing the country code...I believe the driver prevents it from transmitting unless it's set for a country it is allowed to use that bandwidth in.
I am surprised one of your criteria wasn't at least 3 radios for backhaul in a mesh. You may have good reasons for that as I am not as familiar with OpenWRT as many are. I was thinking 4 radios would be best in a mesh but I don't see that in the wifi routers I have looked at recently. If you were doing city scale wifi, then it seems more reasonable to me.
A Very informative and well-composed video. Opens up a lot of valuable information about routers and their inner functionality. So if we take an average router on the market, say Asus, does it mean that they always use a generic CPU and do no background hardware offloading at all, unless this is mentioned somewhere in the GUI as an option? Is there then any benefit of using a router as a box solution vs a software router on a generic CPU and mainboard?
Hi Anton, if there is Offloading or not depends on the Software/Firmware used and the provided hardware capabilities, so hard to say. Open Source like OpenWrt does not really have a choice here quite often because the calls to the Firmware are not always (or even rarely) documented. Whether you run this on embedded hardware or X86 as such depends on the use case. Advantage of the embedded Wi-fi systems is that you get Wi-fi for (relatively) cheap. W/r to Softrouter - depends if you use it on tin (X86) which is just another architecture to use or if you virtualize it (in which case Wi-fi would be difficult to achieve)
Really excellent video! I am looking for a router for my soon to be built new house and replace my old but reliable D-Link DIR-655 which I just discovered is not compatible with DD-WRT and maybe the other open source router OSes as well. Rooting routers is a new process for me so I've much research to do and, at the moment, only a cell phone to do it with. I don't know if the 655 can take Open-WRT or not, do you? If it can I plan to use it as a test platform to teach myself how to root routers and get the most out of whatever becomes my next one. Thank you for this very informative video!
Hello. very good video I know. I bought a pi r2 banana with mt7621 CPU and 2GB memory. Ethernet connections are 1Gb. however wifi is not very good with openwrt. works reasonable with ubuntu. I'm trying to make a CCTV system with ip cameras. still getting beaten ... really enjoyed your video using openwrt and usb camera. Make one with ip camera please!
Great review!. Searching this type of info after fighting with my TP-Link TL-WDR3600 + extroot (succesfully solved!). Unfortunately linksys are around 200usd in my country :(
Hi, that's something I am thinking about for a long time. There are a lot of things to factor in. Wifi6, GBit Speed and the like. The Belkin RT3200 is a good choice but building your own with X86 is definitely a good option as well.
@@OneMarcFifty Thanks...I also considered the Belkin 3200, but its expensive and not easy to get at the moment... I flashed a Xiaomi 4A gigabit edition with OpenWRT using your instruction video, but all of the Mediatek 7603E 2,4Ghz Wifi chips are not working stable. 5Ghz is fine, NAT-speed also fast enough for my 500Mbit/sec WAN. Tested a Cudy WR1300 with the same Mediatek configuration , same unstable, and slow 2,4Ghz network, especially, when transfering Data from my NAS, it´s pure luck, when the data transfer runs until the end, without interrupting or bringing error messages...my problem ist definitvely the Mediatek in combination with Open WRT. It´s also a concern regarding the power consuption. There, the Xiaomi, with under 3 Watts (5Ghz off), is one of the best I tested so far. I would be happy having a low power consuming router with OpenWRT, goes over 500Mbit/sec NAT-speed and has a stable 2,4Ghz Wifi faster than 5MByte/sec.. All other things like Wifi6 are not essential for me using mostly cabled Ethernet....those things would be a bonus for me 🙂 I´m afraid building a X86 system and have a high power consumption, only because there are less and less routers on the market running OpenWRT AND beeing fast AND do not consume too much energy....having not any good alternatives I am running my old Archer C7 Ver5.0 with original or my Archer C7 Ver.2.0 with Open WRT at the moment to have my family peace. Btw. thanks a lot for your videos. I have learned a lot out of them.
Marc gr8 video. I am still watching videos. It means there is value. The a3 paper works....do you place the ad paper into a storyboard(powerpoint) before shooting ?
@OneMarcFifty The real question is will you consult on the best device and will you supply / specify a supplier for it? My budget is three figures for two devices.
Definitely. Many thanks for the hint. I just recently thought “man, all your VLan videos won’t work any more” when they changed the interface. I’ll make a note of that
Let me know how it goes! I've had a hard time in the beginning, but once I sticked to the best practices everything ran smoothly ( I have it running OpenWrt 19.07 for roughly 2 months now)
Well you are probably wondering " how is jon getting on?" marc ! so i will tell you! so i picked up a WRT3200ACM so i can move my netgear R7800 (a capable openwrt router) to AP duties and ditch the R7000 and i picked up a sff dell optiplex 3050 to take over server duties from my odroid ! so i have nearly caught up to date with your tutorials! even have the vps running in the cloud and serving me wireguard vpn. Busy migrating all my docker goodness over from the odroid to the optiplex! but been side tracked a bit becouse those optiplex 3050's are just brilliant so picked up a second for travel duties as a media and retro gaming rig! now i went and lost knollage of how i got the R7800 to publish to mqtt the arp periodically i have the script which if i remember was your script that a adapted for my use now i am hunting for the tutorial to jog my memory!
Ok! so found your github looks like my genius edit of the script was to publish to mqtt on my odroid mosquitto server with user-pass authentication. so i guess slap it in /etc/init.d/ and enable or luci startup ?
Hi Jonathan, great to hear back from you - I am happy the Dell Optiplex thing works for you! Btw if you want to put things into Autostart on OpenWrt, go to Luci then system-startup - local startup. This is where you can edit the /etc/rc.local directly.
Not sure why you aren't getting it - But I'm running an upgraded 19.07.7 firmware Archer C7 v2, and it is offering me Software Offloading and Hardware Offloading options (in the Firewall settings page). I ticked those ('experimental') options and the router is running okay (so far).
It would be awesome if openwrt would make firmware for a in-wall ap for a fast roaming network, there are lots of them on ali for cheap and the in-wall thing it sounds even better
@@OneMarcFifty perhaps for Comfast CF-E550AC, it's on MT7628DA+MT7613B chipset, i've searchd about it but i found nothing, perhaps you can take a look, thank you
Hi, yes the Turris Omnia is a great device - but high end - so is the pricetag ;-) A good alternative is using X86/AMD64, such as the PCEngines APU4D4 board (AMD 64 bit CPU, 3 mPCIE slots) - but the price point is similar.
@@OneMarcFifty Well, compared to the other routers you showed the price difference seems to me not that big. Unfortunately, there are many problems with the stock OpenWrt for Turris Omnia as it is not intended for devices with 8GiB, sadly...
Hi there. I've ordered the TP-Link Archer C7 V5, but it arrive as V4. Should I return it or keep it? I don't really care about the 2 usb ports. I see in another OP video about the DIY mesh setup where the archer C7 V5 supports a feature that is needed for the mesh setup. Does the V4 supports it as well? Read online that there is no difference between the V4 and V5 other than the 2 usb ports on the V4. The difference is in the firmware itself was what I read.
Let me know how this goes - it's not sure that different products use the same technology here. If you can however enable 802.11r and type in a mobility domain on the Ubiquity then it might work.
@@maximusg88 It#s a setting on the Wifi parameters to indicate that different SSIDs belong to the same fast roaming domain - there is a video on this here : ruclips.net/video/kMgs2XFClaM/видео.html
You should ask what they call "a router" first. For me router is a wire-only device with layer 3 functionality (ip,nat,firewall,ipsec,etc). That's it. Why people expect "router" to be 100-in-1 device and include wireless AP's is beyond me.
Hi, great feedback, many thanks - yes, I think it depends on the size of your network or more generally speaking on how many devices you want to power in your home. I think the average user has 1 device and expects that to do everything. But you are formally right - a router strictly speaking is a cabled layer 3 device ;-)
Hi Marc. Great material. How do you think of comparison of Archer C7 (v2 or v5) vs Asus RT-N66U (running Merlin LTS or FreshTomato)? The uses I consider are either AP only (5ghz for phone/laptops/TV + 2.4ghz for IoTs), or AP + WAN-LAN routing, with same use. I also wonder if the fairly newer Xiaomi 4A (50% of their price in the used market) is in the similar league as the other two. Internet connection is 100MBits, but likely to upgrade to 300MBits or 600MBits soon.
Hi, currently I will be looking at Wifi 6 routers such as the Xiaomi AX3200, AX3600, Redmi AX6000 and the netgear WAX206. Follow up to come shortly. In the meanwhile see the status on my github repo here: github.com/onemarcfifty/mu-mimo-test#test-progress
Good test. I recently as in 8 weeks or so swapped my ISP router out for a Pi4b currently running 21.02 RC3 the old router an Arch c1200 as a dumb AP so far so good even with SQM the CPU barely gets above 15% on a 500mbps link
The problem with 4 antennas is that one antenna can only work in one frequency spectrum. So basically half of your antennas will always be on one band, and the other half on the other band
@@OneMarcFifty yes. There are basically 2 options: use a dedicated antenna tuned for a single band or use a dual-band antenna which is neither good on 2.4 nor 5ghz. In order for an antenna and transceiver circuit to work properly on a certain band, both the antenna's lenght must be equal to a factor of the wavelength and the transceiver's RF frontend needs to be fine-tuned to achieve resonance with the antenna in that spectrum. So basically what you have is either 2+2 single band or 4 dual band antennas. Neither of those will perform like 4 single band antennas operating at 5GHz only. So to test this you could wrap 3 antennas in aluminum foil and turn off 2.4/5GHz radios respectively so that only one frequency is turned on and see if you get both 2 and 5 G frequencies at that antenna
Hi Marc, thank you for your work and for this video! Which vdsl modem would you recommend to go with the linksys wrt3200 (I'm in Germany, if that makes a difference)? Thanks a lot!
In a Wi-fi Mesh you would need to have all Mesh nodes on the same channel. With a third radio you could have the mesh on one common channel on the first radio and run AP mode on different channels on the second radio, hence increase the bandwidth, i.e. use multiple channels.
SQM is not your average QOS it reduces ALL latency by eliminating buffer bloat. That's why a beefy CPU is more desirable then using hardware offloading.
The problem with hardware offloading and SQM is that modern Schedulers (like CAKE, PIE, fq_Codel) need to avoid bursts on the uplinks in order to prevent firmware from shaping. If we delegate this to the hard/firmware then they can't work to their full extend. That's the reason btw why you specify speed rates with CAKE.
Hi Archie, I used to power them with 48V injectors in the past. I have now switched to a PoE Switch and I am using Trendnet TPE-104GS and TP-Link TL-PoE10R as splitters.
Hi, many thanks for the feedback - I'll need to do something on 21.x Upgrade - defo. The one thing people are struggling most seems to be the changed VLAN / DSA thing ;-)
latest A2 revision DIR-2660 does not work with openwrt at this stage. which is annoying as i specificity bought a 2660 to put openwrt on after watching this video and now can't
Hi, as it looks from this discussion here forum.openwrt.org/t/d-link-dir-2660-a2/89507 you can use the A1 firmware but would need to patch a couple bytes - presumably this should be fixed in the release soon.
@@OneMarcFifty yeah there was a commit somtime ago that aparently fixed it, it's unclear if it's made it even into the development snapshots yet though, they didn't seem to work either when i tried.
Hey Radu, yes - I mean, it's a great device. The only thing that startles me a bit is that there is no MU-MIMO support in the mt76 OpenWrt drivers, even though the proprietary drivers have MU-MIMO support.
Hi Bobby, absolutely. That's actually what I am using at home now. I am running my internet gateway on a PCEnginges APU4D4 board (AMD GX-412TC quad Jaguar core with 64 bit and AES-NI support) - runs like a charm. I am sure I could even run pfsense in a VM on top of OpenWrt on that ;-) Problem with generic X86 (small factor) would be the missing expansion slots for Wifi etc. But therre are cheap options, e.g. using thin clients with expansion slots or boards with mini-PCIE slots
Thanks for the wonderful information, Marc. I didn’t realize you have archer c7/ac1750. I have one as well. Do you have any vids covering vlan setup using this router?
Actually if you check the OpenWrt playlist - all VLAN videos are made on the Archer C7. But things have changed a lot in Version 21. VLAN functionality is not on the switch any more, but rather on the Interface.
Hello ! Thank you for the great video ! I compared the specs of Archer C7 and fritzbox 4020 (which I already have), and they are similar except for Wi-Fi. I use access points (unifi) for Wi-Fi, so the quality of Wi-Fi of the router itself is not very important. Would you say that they would perform the same in other respects ? I plan to order VDSL 100 or perhaps 50 from telekom. (perhaps 50 is more stable?) I suppose there are other routers with similar spec. I wonder what makes Archer C7 stick out among them.
Hi - I can't really comment on the Fritzboxes as I have never owned one ;-( I think what makes the Archer C7 so popular is the compatibility with Linux plus the interesting price point.
@@OneMarcFifty Thank you for your reply ! However I don't really understand it;; If C7 gets OpenWRT, it will be managed by Luci or SSH, so I don't understand what you meant by "compatibility with linux".... And with "price point", did you mean a good cost-performance ? (preiswert) ?
Hi Marc! Thank you for your time, I always enjoy your videos. 👌👌👌 I've been looking for a kinda powerful router with AX WiFi, at home we have 1Gbps speed and also using it to access remotely for some mini-lab/server personal usage. So, I want the best speeds as I can get from my connection. At home we have 6/6E enabled devices so we want to take advantage of this too. I also want to run WireGuard on the own router, but high bandwidth connection + WireGuard may be a resource hog for "home routers"... If this was your case, would you rather make your own kinda powerful gateway/router like a NanoPi R4S (w/ 2x1Gbps ports) with OpenWRT and install dedicated APs or go for an "all in one" router capable of running WireGuard flawlessly and use WiFi 6 even if it costs more? Thanks!
Actually I have just recently switched to a home made router with a PC Engines APU4D4 board (X86 hardware) - only problem is that I can't find mPCie hardware for Wi-fi 6 that does support Wi-fi6 in Access Point mode (the AX200's don't)...
@@OneMarcFifty Oh! I may go for 2 UniFi APs running over a PoE switch. But the "router" device I think I'll use some kind of NanoPi R4S or so on. Also APU4D4 looks interesting... Thanks!
@@OneMarcFifty Oh! I may go for 2 UniFi APs running over a PoE switch. But the "router" device I think I'll use some kind of NanoPi R4S or so on. Also APU4D4 looks interesting... Thanks!
@OneMarcFifty I have a problem with 2 AP in fast roaming 802.11r and WIFI calling service. When I moved from 1 AP coverage to second in the house, wifi calling deactivated and cannot reconnect in new 2 AP coverage. Are there any parameters that can help?
@@OneMarcFifty i forget (must check my x86 cards lol) but i think rtl8152 is used for the dual port pcie x1 cards i cant get now rtl8152= dual pcie , *r8125* = usb3 found everywhere still.. there are usb3 & pcie x4 5Gbit/s chips to but double+ the price
Hi, that is absolutely on my roadmap. I have bought an APU4d mainboard from PCEngines which has an AMD processor and 4 Switch Ports - You are right that if you are looking for router functionality (i.e. no Wi-Fi) a small PC is actually the better solution - but an episode on this should follow in January / February latest
Most ath79 targets including the C7 do not support DSA which is pretty disappointing. This may change in the future but as such I don't necessarily recommend it for new openWRT builds.
Please visit my channel page: ruclips.net/user/onemarcfifty
Want to talk to me? Join my Discord Server: discord.com/invite/DXnfBUG
Main problems with these routers - versions. Vendors often start with some nice chipsets, lots of RAM and storage. And over time, without external change, the internals change, the same model suddenly runs completely different HW with much more limited RAM, storage, etc. It happened to me multiple times that I purchased some device listed on OpenWRT as supported, just to find out that supported was Version 4 and I got Version 5 (not listed at the vendor site, of course) and my device is either not yet supported, or even worse, never will be.
So, be careful when checking the device, always also check version.
You are spot on. That's really a big challenge. And unfortunately it drives a lot of people away from OpenWrt because they think OpenWrt is to blame. That's also the main reason why I am so reluctant to do the same video for 2022 - Any time that I "recommend" a router, I have no control what the vendor will do next and potentially steer thousands of people to an unusable device ;-(
@@OneMarcFifty Your own isp
so don't buy tp-link )
Tplink do it more often.
Jesus, I appreciate your hard work to put this comparation together.
Many thanks 😉
Marc, well done sir. 1 brief correction for you. The number of antennas you have one your router or AP governs the maximum speed you can go. So in the case where you have a router with 4 antenna, 2 might be used for 2.4G and 2 for 5G, so 2.4G can only go 300Mbps for 802.11N speeds and AC/AX will max out at just under 450Mbps. The next limiting issues are your devices connecting to the router/AP. If the router/AP has 4 antennas and you phone only has 2, you only get 2 streams of MIMO, hence the 300Mbps on your phone. Last but even more importantly, the farthest device (weakest signal) governs the max speed of the whole network. Since Wi-Fi has built in rate fallback functions to keep client devices connect, all devices connected to the router/AP suffer the same fall back. I recommend you turn off the lower speeds in N, turn off 802.11B completely and add a second wired AP (turn off dhcp service and set it’s address statically). I hope this helps and doesn’t confuse to many out there. Yes, wireless is my professional role.
Awesome feedback Dan, many thanks!
It's not quite like that. Some routers are 4x4 on 5GHz and 4x4 on 2.4GHz and have 4 physical antennas instead of 8.
It is now 2024 and I have found a pretty decent router for OpenWRT, which is quite cheap and works stable, fast and power efficent.
The TP-Link Archer AX23. Damned easy to convert to OpenWRT. The only little restriction is the small amount of storage (16/128)
thank you for the really clear explanations. I have paid for courses and not learned anywhere near as much as i learn from you
Many thanks for the friendly feedback !
For a budget router I can recommend the Xiaomi 4A Gigabit Edition. I've got mine for 15,99 € at Amazon Warehouse Deals. It only has two regular LAN ports, but the WAN port can be configured to be LAN. Flashing OpenWrt is pretty easy with OpenWRTInvasion.
Here is the thing: I was looking for a router/ap to buy in place of the Archer C7 which is pricey where I live, saw your suggestion, got a Xiaomi 4A Giga for half the price of the C7, flashed OpenWRT and... everything is great! Thank you! May the networking gods smile upon your packets.
Hi, many thanks for the feedback ! Xiaomi comes up quite often as a suggestion - I believe I'll have to have a look at them ;-)
Can I buy 2 or 3 of this to daisy chain? I am sorry I am a newbie on this.
@@adrian4jc You can create a mesh with OpenWrt
@@TheMave95 many thanks. I have a virgin media router and runs at 200mbps speed. If I successfully flushed it with openwrt, should I just plug this with my existing router and daisy chain this with 2 or 3 XIAOMI routers?
Inglés
I have seen this video 4 times and learned some things, I did not even know what iperf3 was, but now I can use this great tool, thank you sir for your knowledge.
Many thanks - I am happy you liked it!!!
Thank you for another great video! I very much enjoyed it, especially learning about hardware acceleration & htop monitoring!
Many thanks for your feedback;-)
I think the title should read: "Which WiFi Router is best for OpenWrt in 2021?" since your suggestion appear to be concentrated around WiFi routers. I personally like the Luxul ABR-4500. Nevertheless, your video is very informative. Thank you!
Good point, many thanks.
Thank you, as my Archer C7 went up in smoke, i got some interesting hints from here. Next will be a Linksys EA7300 with mediatek base.
Hi, many thanks for sharing. Let me know how things go.
Can you do a follow up for 2022/2023? Appreciate all your videos!
Hi Luke, this request has come up a couple of times. I am a bit uncertain about a follow up. The hardware shortage and limited availability of Wifi6 options makes this a real challenge.
i have been using the wrt3200acm ever since it came out & i absolutely love it
Thanks for the great video series on openwrt. I love it. Going for a 1GB internet connection now, I verified your test results for my 4 tp-link archer. Great. I had to learn that it makes no sense to install iperf3 on a router. But a warning to all, the DIR-3060 I bought after this video IS NOT SUPPORTED by openwrt. Board design seems to differ a lot, and a trial to port got stuck somehow. Just a warning for all others watching. Next trail, will be an arm-based router board. Marc for your device, have you found a usable port?
Hi Andreas, I am using the DIR-2660 firmware on my DIR-3060 and it works great - just I can't use the 3rd radio, but 2 radios are fine for my use case.
I wouldn't have one device doing all those things because if it breaks then the whole thing collapses. Lets say a raspberry pi4 could be your server and router, with a managed switch and an access point for the wifi, using vlans to separate your domains. You can use the managed switch to route your internet modem into the pi4 and all vlan interface on the pi4. Access point will use the vlans with unmanaged interfaces for each network, bridged with the wireless interfaces. All dhcp will be on the pi4 and you can run pihole for your whole network. Plug a couple of large usb3 drives into the pi for backups and media serving. (One armed router).
Hi, many thanks for your feedback - yes, you can scale up/down as much as you want - in a nutshell that's the great thing with Open Source and standards - you can design nearly every infrastructure you like at nearly no additional cost ;-)
Can't wait to see you DIY router build.
It’s coming ;-)
This is what I need to start with OpenWrt :) Thank you.
Current using TP-link Archer C2 but it show its age now :)
Many thanks - glad it was useful ;-)
I came here as I need to replace my Archer V600 with an OpenWRT or DDWRT router. Leaving the Archer to handle the VDSL only.
I see you are recommending a TP-Link. However the reason I am replacing the Archer is that it's wifi is unstable, it's fine for a few weeks, then randomly it drops a handful of device, usually those that can't migrate to other APs due to signal. Reboot the archer, it all works again.
I could not see that happening on the C7. If I remember well the V600 did only have 2.4GHz right ? Alternatively you might want to look for a cheap Mediatek alernative like the Xiaomi Mirouter 4A Gigabit
@@OneMarcFifty Thanks. I was mistaken it's a V900 I'm replacing. I think it suffers from memory corruption with high device count. I bought a WRT3200acm and a Draytech VDSL dedicated modem.
At the same time I updated my switches to managed and have been following your other videos for OpenWRT to set up a Guest VLAN properly for wired access (work laptop).
Your video on VirtualBox was helpful and allowed me to set it up in a lab and play around. That was after locking myself out of the router a few times playing with VLANs :)
Hey i bought dir 2660 after so many research but did saw your video as the title of video didn't mention any router name😅...i have installed latest openwrt and setup sqm qos (i dont know if i configured it correctly). My connection speed is 150 up and down fiber. The help i need is ,can you make any video for setting sqm qos for fiber network. Im just a noob at these kind of things.
Many thanks for the feedback - I had tagged the video with the product name but RUclips doesn't show it prominently - w/r to SQM - I will do a separate QoS/SQM video very shortly.
I love the videos. Could you do an updated video for 2022? Thanks Marc
Hey, thanks for the feedback - I might do one for 2023 ;-)
Thanks, great video as always! I use a Mirouter 4A Giga that also uses the MediaTek mt7621 and except the 2.4GHz driver it's fantastic. The stability isn't perfect yet, which is why I have a cron job that restarts the router every week. I had some weird stuff happening after 40 days uptime so I thought it might as well reboot every so often to never run into stuff like that, but for just 35€ new it's a steel.
Also I think that MU-MIMO is unfortunately not supported in hostapd atm if I'm remembering correctly.
Many thanks for the feedback. I just checked on MU-MIMO and it should be implemented in theory, at least for ath10k and mt7615. I'll double check and test. Maybe hostapd needs some trigger to actually use it...
Btw, good idea for testing speed instead of iperf3 (a bit more visual) is to run open speed test on some docker-capable machine in your network.
Great comment Robert, many thanks - I did not know that I could self-host open speed test (until I dug a bit deeper following your comment ;-) )
'Preciate the video. One of the things I got out of it was the software page showing the sysupgrade download. Just used it to update my c7
Awesome, many thanks for sharing!
I bought a second hand WRT1900ACS V2 for €25. It handles gigabit speed with SQM Cake enabled, without software or hardware offloading enabled. Also a good recommendation. The wifi does not support DFS though, but I don't use it myself.
Thanks for sharing! 25 is a bargain ;-)
I didn't realise the Slingshot Channel was into OpenWRT 🤗
I had to search for that on RUclips;-) I get it - really funny rofl ;-)
An old PC (x86) and a couple cheap access points works great for me, especially with VPN service.
Yes - that's definitely a great way to go at the moment given the difficult situation on the hardware market. Older x86 hardware (broken Laptop, Thin client or the like) definitely beat everything else in terms of CPU.
SO useful and such a easy to follow/navigate around format! Thank you, subscribed!
Many thanks Ivan, glad you liked it !!!
Congratulations. Do a review of openwrt and mikrotik and also ubiquiti. Mainly about your installation 911,922, groove metal and others. Also mention using with nanosation ac m5, thank you very much.
Thanks !!!
You saved my day with the flow offloading setting !!
Awesome! I am happy that it was useful!
Thanks a lot sir. Cleared my all doubts. Going for C7 as it suits best for me.
Hi Nitin, glad it helped, many thanks!
Next topic please. SQM for wan, lan and wifi
Hi, Quality of Serivce is on my list - especially with everyone working from home these days I think it's a big issue.
Excellent video, I was just looking for some sort of performance test (old routers refurbished with Openwrt :P ) and didn't know about the iPerf tool. Thanks
Many thanks for the feedback! I have been thinking of maybe doing a Toolbox video on iperf3 and another one on htop. Very much like Webmin and Ventoy those are just little helpers I don’t want to miss ;-)
Excellent video, very interesting stuff! Thanks for taking the time to post it.
Many thanks Gurdeep. And thanks for watching.
I asked the same question below on one of your old O.wrt videos would like to repeat here. I am sure if a competent it person such as yourself chooses O.Wrt over pfsense there is for sure a valid and solid reason. Kindly share it with us. Thanks again
Copy of the origina answer: "Well, you know - like so often in IT you use what you know - I know Linux and I know OpenWrt - just happened so 😉 I have just never felt the need for anything else. I am tempted to believe that it must be the same for someone who uses pfsense. I do have it on my list though 😉"
@@OneMarcFifty thank you for taking time and putting info here too. Any one who might wonder could find the answer here as well. Regards.
@@OneMarcFifty btw I use neither openwrt nor pfsense. I installed pfsense on docker but much scared to dive into.
Please make a video about Netgear R7800!
Hi, it seams that a lot of people are using the Nighthawk R7800 with OpenWrt - and - seriously - it's a great device - Ath10K wifi etc... The reason that I chose those devices to compare was to make people aware of possibilities on how to measure throughput and CPU usage and also show the hardware offloading possibilities for MEdiatek ;-)
Will you do this for 2023?
Nice in-depth review, did not know hardware accelerators existed or made such a difference.
It depends so much on the hardware being used - the native / stock firmware very often makes use of those but with the free drivers we are very often limited....
@@OneMarcFifty Thanks. By the way, if you enable super thanks on your channel, I will send you a super thanks.
Wish you would've kept this up. It's hard to find a more current router that is being sold to use opnwrt on.
I am running wrt3200acm with OpenWRT OS for 5 years so I would like to share my thoughts on it.
I bough it because vendor claimed: "Open source ready with OpenWrt and DD-WRT"
It is clearly bullshit from their side because of mwlwifi driver no-development/bugs. If somebody claims it is open source ready I would expect that is means open source including drivers.
However it is great router and I would like to highligh Dual Firmware Flashing feature. From my POV it is MUST have feature for WRT upgrades. For example I have upgraded OS and girlfriend complained about something is not working. So I rolled up to known good configuration in 30 seconds! When I am alone at home I can continue with changing and troubleshooting. Who has experience with girlfriend did not have internet on her phone known what that means.
Next router I will buy will be definitely with OpenWRT OS however I will triple check that wifi driver (or any other drivers) on that device is decent sort (definitely not Marvell).
Totally agree with you. The wifi drivers for marvell are a challenge at best. Anything using ath10k or mt76 runs much better.
Very interesting video even for those like me who have been using Openwrt since Asus WL500gP. BTW I still have a C7 as a spare an a 100Mbps connection at home
Many thanks for the feedback! I still have my C7's in a box - I will probably use them to build an 802.11s mesh for one of the next Wi-Fi videos and then pull out the ath10K cards in order to build my own router on X86 ;-) ruclips.net/channel/UCG5Ph9Mm6UEQLJJ-kGIC2AQ
You explained the subject pretty well !
Can you make videos on following topics :
1) Does getting dedicated Access point hardware necessary?
2) PFsense vs OpenWRT
Hi, ive been researching a bit and heres what ive found:
1) getting a dedicated hardware access point is not necessary for most people and just adds unnecessary complexity. Also most of the time they are more expensive than an old router thats put into AP mode
2) pfsense is most of the time ROUTER only and has no wifi capabilities, so an AP is required if you are going to flash something with pfsense. However, pfsense is being phased out with opnsense as there is some controversy with pfsense.
meanwhile, openwrt keeps the wifi capabilities of the router.
Hi, many thanks for your comments and feedback. Yes, 90% of the Wi-fi users presumably will never need a dedicated / separate Access point. Unless you have a) a larger area to cover or b) you are interested in DIY and want to learn how to build the stuff yourself or c) you realize that your device saturates on CPU etc. in which case separating router (OpenWrt, RouterOS, PFSense, OPNSense) and Access point (OpenWrt) makes total sense ;-)
Hi, Marc, I would love to see a video on the NaoPi R4S and R2S!
I might look into those once prices go down a bit more ;-(
I bought a Eero Mesh to solve my bufferbloat issues on the network. Seems to have done the job thanks to SQM.
Thanks John - and you are running OpenWrt with SQM on it ?
@@OneMarcFifty Nah, just using the default firmware that came with it. I can activate SQM through the beta labs.
Belkin RT3200 can be had for cheap and works great with openwrt..
Hi Paul - yes, I bought one last week ;-) Will make a video on Wifi 6 with OpenWrt soon ;-)
A very interesting comparison. I learned many things from this video. Thank you!
Awesome, glad you could use it ;-)
The era of variant Ar71xx chipsets is end, it was lasted for so long because Internet growth isn't as fast as computer speed, there's no point having multi cores cpu on a router when people can only get or afford 10mbps connection, most newer openwrt firmware now focusing on mediatek and I'm glad it's shifting, the wifi performance is still bad in general but at least we get better wired performance. 64MB ram is almost standard now which is sad, and at least 16MB ROM, unfortunately company like TPLINK makes progress even harder, they still producing more cheap routers like wr820n/844n with only 2MB ROM they knew that people are still going to buy these routers.
Thank you marc for this awesome comparison.
Many thanks for your feedback Eliade. Yes - totally true - it's a pitty they still produce those weak routers. Economically _and_ ecologicaly...
thx u comrad u allowed me to understand why I had issue with my linksys wireless a true bro !!!
Many thanks for the feedback! I am glad it helped. I remember when I discovered the problem I was so disappointed and was about to throw the device out - glad I kept it ;-)
Great job with this video. Very thorough. Thank you!!
Many thanks!
Thanks very much. You mentioned in the video that you will leave the commands to get WRT3200ACM WIFI working in the description. I think you forgot to include it. Would be kind enough to let me know what those commands where. I am currently having issues with WIFI on this router, everything else is working. I know you also mentioned to go back to older version. Just that I have done enough setup of other things that I just cannot undo them all at the moment. I have another WIFI router that is currently doing my WIFI.
Ooops - my bad - in a nutshell, on the command line you can do (XX being your country code):
uci set wireless.radio0.country='XX'
uci set wireless.radio1.country='XX'
uci set wireless.radio2.disabled='1'
uci commit
Alternatively set the country on each Wifi in the "advanced tab" and disable the radio2
Great comparison! Cannot wait for the next video.
Thank you very much!
I use the Linksys E8450, currently it only supports snapshot releases, but its working perfectly with sysupgrade and everything from what I can tell. The only issue I am having with it is 160MHz does not work.
Can the Linksys not do it or is it maybe your clients not being able to connect to 160 MHz? I’ve had issues with my iPhone connecting to 160 MHz in the past…
@@OneMarcFifty I can select 160, LUCI says its working, but no device in my home can see it. I live in a very rural area, so there are no other access points. It wont even show up on any SDR I have setup. Not even my desktop with an intel AX card sees. Stock firmware has it locked at a max of 80Mhz so I assume the card on the router is incapable of it or something. Very odd.
@@FeralFoxDX i’ve had the same with my iphone and the D-Link so I assumed my iphone can just not handle it. But I would need to test with another router as Wifi client in order to verify.
@@OneMarcFifty I see you have purchased the Belkin branded model in some of your newer videos. I forgot to mention until now that I was able to successfully enable 160MHz by changing the country code...I believe the driver prevents it from transmitting unless it's set for a country it is allowed to use that bandwidth in.
I am surprised one of your criteria wasn't at least 3 radios for backhaul in a mesh. You may have good reasons for that as I am not as familiar with OpenWRT as many are. I was thinking 4 radios would be best in a mesh but I don't see that in the wifi routers I have looked at recently. If you were doing city scale wifi, then it seems more reasonable to me.
A Very informative and well-composed video. Opens up a lot of valuable information about routers and their inner functionality. So if we take an average router on the market, say Asus, does it mean that they always use a generic CPU and do no background hardware offloading at all, unless this is mentioned somewhere in the GUI as an option? Is there then any benefit of using a router as a box solution vs a software router on a generic CPU and mainboard?
Hi Anton, if there is Offloading or not depends on the Software/Firmware used and the provided hardware capabilities, so hard to say. Open Source like OpenWrt does not really have a choice here quite often because the calls to the Firmware are not always (or even rarely) documented. Whether you run this on embedded hardware or X86 as such depends on the use case. Advantage of the embedded Wi-fi systems is that you get Wi-fi for (relatively) cheap. W/r to Softrouter - depends if you use it on tin (X86) which is just another architecture to use or if you virtualize it (in which case Wi-fi would be difficult to achieve)
I run a DIR-882, great speeds and reliability with the RC2. I'll skip RC3 and wait for the full release.
Awesome thanks for sharing
Really excellent video! I am looking for a router for my soon to be built new house and replace my old but reliable D-Link DIR-655 which I just discovered is not compatible with DD-WRT and maybe the other open source router OSes as well. Rooting routers is a new process for me so I've much research to do and, at the moment, only a cell phone to do it with. I don't know if the 655 can take Open-WRT or not, do you? If it can I plan to use it as a test platform to teach myself how to root routers and get the most out of whatever becomes my next one. Thank you for this very informative video!
I couldn‘t find the DIR-655 in the OpenWrt table of hardware. So I am afraid that it‘s not supported
Hello. very good video I know. I bought a pi r2 banana with mt7621 CPU and 2GB memory. Ethernet connections are 1Gb. however wifi is not very good with openwrt. works reasonable with ubuntu. I'm trying to make a CCTV system with ip cameras. still getting beaten ... really enjoyed your video using openwrt and usb camera. Make one with ip camera please!
Will do - it’s on the list ;-)
Cudy AC2100. $40 on Amazon. Works great. Very fast router for the money.
Looks good - I might have a look at that one ;-)
Very poor range, limited by low quality cpu
Personaly I use Netgear R7800 - Nighthawk
Many thanks for the feedback John - very popular QCA9984 wifi device for OpenWrt ;-)
Thank's for Great video. What do you think about Netgear x4s r7800?
Looks great ;-)
Great review!. Searching this type of info after fighting with my TP-Link TL-WDR3600 + extroot (succesfully solved!). Unfortunately linksys are around 200usd in my country :(
Maybe have a look at the Belkin Rt3200?
I am interrested in listening to your choice of routers in November 2022....are there any new models, which you recommend ?
Hi, that's something I am thinking about for a long time. There are a lot of things to factor in. Wifi6, GBit Speed and the like. The Belkin RT3200 is a good choice but building your own with X86 is definitely a good option as well.
@@OneMarcFifty Thanks...I also considered the Belkin 3200, but its expensive and not easy to get at the moment...
I flashed a Xiaomi 4A gigabit edition with OpenWRT using your instruction video, but all of the Mediatek 7603E 2,4Ghz Wifi chips are not working stable. 5Ghz is fine, NAT-speed also fast enough for my 500Mbit/sec WAN.
Tested a Cudy WR1300 with the same Mediatek configuration , same unstable, and slow 2,4Ghz network, especially, when transfering Data from my NAS, it´s pure luck, when the data transfer runs until the end, without interrupting or bringing error messages...my problem ist definitvely the Mediatek in combination with Open WRT.
It´s also a concern regarding the power consuption. There, the Xiaomi, with under 3 Watts (5Ghz off), is one of the best I tested so far.
I would be happy having a low power consuming router with OpenWRT, goes over 500Mbit/sec NAT-speed and has a stable 2,4Ghz Wifi faster than 5MByte/sec..
All other things like Wifi6 are not essential for me using mostly cabled Ethernet....those things would be a bonus for me 🙂
I´m afraid building a X86 system and have a high power consumption, only because there are less and less routers on the market running OpenWRT AND beeing fast AND do not consume too much energy....having not any good alternatives I am running my old Archer C7 Ver5.0 with original or my Archer C7 Ver.2.0 with Open WRT at the moment to have my family peace.
Btw. thanks a lot for your videos. I have learned a lot out of them.
Marc gr8 video. I am still watching videos. It means there is value. The a3 paper works....do you place the ad paper into a storyboard(powerpoint) before shooting ?
Hi Erdem, no - I just start writing ;-)
@OneMarcFifty The real question is will you consult on the best device and will you supply / specify a supplier for it? My budget is three figures for two devices.
Very well done, Marc. Clear, sequential, easy-to-understand.
Hi Marc, your channel is fantastic thanks. Any chance of a DSA on OpenWRT for dummies video? :-)
Definitely. Many thanks for the hint. I just recently thought “man, all your VLan videos won’t work any more” when they changed the interface. I’ll make a note of that
@@OneMarcFifty Waiting DSA video on OpenWRT for dummies :) cheers
Great video, I will try openwrt on my 3200acm!
Let me know how it goes! I've had a hard time in the beginning, but once I sticked to the best practices everything ran smoothly ( I have it running OpenWrt 19.07 for roughly 2 months now)
Well you are probably wondering " how is jon getting on?" marc ! so i will tell you! so i picked up a WRT3200ACM so i can move my netgear R7800 (a capable openwrt router) to AP duties and ditch the R7000 and i picked up a sff dell optiplex 3050 to take over server duties from my odroid ! so i have nearly caught up to date with your tutorials! even have the vps running in the cloud and serving me wireguard vpn. Busy migrating all my docker goodness over from the odroid to the optiplex! but been side tracked a bit becouse those optiplex 3050's are just brilliant so picked up a second for travel duties as a media and retro gaming rig! now i went and lost knollage of how i got the R7800 to publish to mqtt the arp periodically i have the script which if i remember was your script that a adapted for my use now i am hunting for the tutorial to jog my memory!
Ok! so found your github looks like my genius edit of the script was to publish to mqtt on my odroid mosquitto server with user-pass authentication. so i guess slap it in /etc/init.d/ and enable or luci startup ?
Hi Jonathan, great to hear back from you - I am happy the Dell Optiplex thing works for you! Btw if you want to put things into Autostart on OpenWrt, go to Luci then system-startup - local startup. This is where you can edit the /etc/rc.local directly.
Not sure why you aren't getting it - But I'm running an upgraded 19.07.7 firmware Archer C7 v2, and it is offering me Software Offloading and Hardware Offloading options (in the Firewall settings page). I ticked those ('experimental') options and the router is running okay (so far).
Hi Steven, the boxes are always there. Just ticking hardware offloading doesn't do anything on the Archer. Currently only for Mediatek.
Ah. That makes it clear. Thanks for the response. I hadn't analysed it myself.
It would be awesome if openwrt would make firmware for a in-wall ap for a fast roaming network, there are lots of them on ali for cheap and the in-wall thing it sounds even better
Hi, many thanks for the suggestion - it might already be supported - which hardware would you be looking at specifically?
@@OneMarcFifty perhaps for Comfast CF-E550AC, it's on MT7628DA+MT7613B chipset, i've searchd about it but i found nothing, perhaps you can take a look,
thank you
Great Video
Many thanks!
I haven't seen anything better than Turris Omnia for OpenWrt...
Hi, yes the Turris Omnia is a great device - but high end - so is the pricetag ;-) A good alternative is using X86/AMD64, such as the PCEngines APU4D4 board (AMD 64 bit CPU, 3 mPCIE slots) - but the price point is similar.
@@OneMarcFifty Well, compared to the other routers you showed the price difference seems to me not that big.
Unfortunately, there are many problems with the stock OpenWrt for Turris Omnia as it is not intended for devices with 8GiB, sadly...
Hi there. I've ordered the TP-Link Archer C7 V5, but it arrive as V4. Should I return it or keep it? I don't really care about the 2 usb ports. I see in another OP video about the DIY mesh setup where the archer C7 V5 supports a feature that is needed for the mesh setup. Does the V4 supports it as well? Read online that there is no difference between the V4 and V5 other than the 2 usb ports on the V4. The difference is in the firmware itself was what I read.
Looking at the hardware specs - they seem to be identical so I think you can give it a go
Great... Will use my Archer C7 v5 in combination with my Unifi AP for fast roaming via OpenWRT then
Let me know how this goes - it's not sure that different products use the same technology here. If you can however enable 802.11r and type in a mobility domain on the Ubiquity then it might work.
@@OneMarcFifty what's a mobility domain? :) sorry - I'm a noob... I can certainly enable 802.11r on my ubiqity
@@maximusg88 It#s a setting on the Wifi parameters to indicate that different SSIDs belong to the same fast roaming domain - there is a video on this here : ruclips.net/video/kMgs2XFClaM/видео.html
@@OneMarcFifty awesome - thanks :) Will check that out!
You’re the man
Thanks mate!
damn right
You should ask what they call "a router" first. For me router is a wire-only device with layer 3 functionality (ip,nat,firewall,ipsec,etc). That's it. Why people expect "router" to be 100-in-1 device and include wireless AP's is beyond me.
Hi, great feedback, many thanks - yes, I think it depends on the size of your network or more generally speaking on how many devices you want to power in your home. I think the average user has 1 device and expects that to do everything. But you are formally right - a router strictly speaking is a cabled layer 3 device ;-)
Hi Marc. Great material. How do you think of comparison of Archer C7 (v2 or v5) vs Asus RT-N66U (running Merlin LTS or FreshTomato)? The uses I consider are either AP only (5ghz for phone/laptops/TV + 2.4ghz for IoTs), or AP + WAN-LAN routing, with same use. I also wonder if the fairly newer Xiaomi 4A (50% of their price in the used market) is in the similar league as the other two. Internet connection is 100MBits, but likely to upgrade to 300MBits or 600MBits soon.
Hi, currently I will be looking at Wifi 6 routers such as the Xiaomi AX3200, AX3600, Redmi AX6000 and the netgear WAX206. Follow up to come shortly. In the meanwhile see the status on my github repo here: github.com/onemarcfifty/mu-mimo-test#test-progress
you explain things really well, good video
Thank you very much ;-)
I would have used the other routers as clients to test MU-MIMO.
Good test.
I recently as in 8 weeks or so swapped my ISP router out for a Pi4b currently running 21.02 RC3 the old router an Arch c1200 as a dumb AP so far so good even with SQM the CPU barely gets above 15% on a 500mbps link
That’s not bad at all! 15% Cpu with SQM is great!
superb, will be 2023 version "Which Router is best for OpenWrt in 2023" ?
Yes, I am working on this. I actually already bought roughly 10 routers!!!
@@OneMarcFifty cool
You an track my progress here: github.com/onemarcfifty/mu-mimo-test#test-progress
@@OneMarcFifty thank you
The problem with 4 antennas is that one antenna can only work in one frequency spectrum. So basically half of your antennas will always be on one band, and the other half on the other band
By band you mean 2.4 / 5GHz ? The antennas of the D-Link are all 5 GHz afaik
@@OneMarcFifty yes. There are basically 2 options: use a dedicated antenna tuned for a single band or use a dual-band antenna which is neither good on 2.4 nor 5ghz. In order for an antenna and transceiver circuit to work properly on a certain band, both the antenna's lenght must be equal to a factor of the wavelength and the transceiver's RF frontend needs to be fine-tuned to achieve resonance with the antenna in that spectrum. So basically what you have is either 2+2 single band or 4 dual band antennas. Neither of those will perform like 4 single band antennas operating at 5GHz only. So to test this you could wrap 3 antennas in aluminum foil and turn off 2.4/5GHz radios respectively so that only one frequency is turned on and see if you get both 2 and 5 G frequencies at that antenna
Hi Marc, thank you for your work and for this video! Which vdsl modem would you recommend to go with the linksys wrt3200 (I'm in Germany, if that makes a difference)?
Thanks a lot!
I personally use the dsl modem which my provider (Telekom...) gave me - I consider my network to start after the ISP's modem/router.
15:54 What extra antenna has to do with Wi-Fi mesh?
What us multi-channel?
In a Wi-fi Mesh you would need to have all Mesh nodes on the same channel. With a third radio you could have the mesh on one common channel on the first radio and run AP mode on different channels on the second radio, hence increase the bandwidth, i.e. use multiple channels.
SQM is not your average QOS it reduces ALL latency by eliminating buffer bloat. That's why a beefy CPU is more desirable then using hardware offloading.
The problem with hardware offloading and SQM is that modern Schedulers (like CAKE, PIE, fq_Codel) need to avoid bursts on the uplinks in order to prevent firmware from shaping. If we delegate this to the hard/firmware then they can't work to their full extend. That's the reason btw why you specify speed rates with CAKE.
thanks for the great video sir! May I please know how were you able to power your routers with PoE? was it by injector? thanks again!
Hi Archie, I used to power them with 48V injectors in the past. I have now switched to a PoE Switch and I am using Trendnet TPE-104GS and TP-Link TL-PoE10R as splitters.
how do you upgrade MediaTek MT7621AT to OpenWrt 21.0X, maybe you could do a video on upgrading - the dos & don'ts.
Hi, many thanks for the feedback - I'll need to do something on 21.x Upgrade - defo. The one thing people are struggling most seems to be the changed VLAN / DSA thing ;-)
@@OneMarcFifty I got it upgraded after some posts on the openwrt forum, lots to learn about openwrt, keep it up!
latest A2 revision DIR-2660 does not work with openwrt at this stage. which is annoying as i specificity bought a 2660 to put openwrt on after watching this video and now can't
Hi, as it looks from this discussion here forum.openwrt.org/t/d-link-dir-2660-a2/89507 you can use the A1 firmware but would need to patch a couple bytes - presumably this should be fixed in the release soon.
@@OneMarcFifty yeah there was a commit somtime ago that aparently fixed it, it's unclear if it's made it even into the development snapshots yet though, they didn't seem to work either when i tried.
Marc, would you still recommend the D-link DIR-3060 in 2022? Could you please please do a video on this router? Many thanks.
Hey Radu, yes - I mean, it's a great device. The only thing that startles me a bit is that there is no MU-MIMO support in the mt76 OpenWrt drivers, even though the proprietary drivers have MU-MIMO support.
You can also install openWRT on an x86 platform.
Hi Bobby, absolutely. That's actually what I am using at home now. I am running my internet gateway on a PCEnginges APU4D4 board (AMD GX-412TC quad Jaguar core with 64 bit and AES-NI support) - runs like a charm. I am sure I could even run pfsense in a VM on top of OpenWrt on that ;-) Problem with generic X86 (small factor) would be the missing expansion slots for Wifi etc. But therre are cheap options, e.g. using thin clients with expansion slots or boards with mini-PCIE slots
Thanks for the wonderful information, Marc. I didn’t realize you have archer c7/ac1750. I have one as well. Do you have any vids covering vlan setup using this router?
Actually if you check the OpenWrt playlist - all VLAN videos are made on the Archer C7. But things have changed a lot in Version 21. VLAN functionality is not on the switch any more, but rather on the Interface.
@@OneMarcFifty thanks again, Marc!, I will search…
Hello ! Thank you for the great video ! I compared the specs of Archer C7 and fritzbox 4020 (which I already have), and they are similar except for Wi-Fi. I use access points (unifi) for Wi-Fi, so the quality of Wi-Fi of the router itself is not very important. Would you say that they would perform the same in other respects ? I plan to order VDSL 100 or perhaps 50 from telekom. (perhaps 50 is more stable?)
I suppose there are other routers with similar spec. I wonder what makes Archer C7 stick out among them.
Hi - I can't really comment on the Fritzboxes as I have never owned one ;-( I think what makes the Archer C7 so popular is the compatibility with Linux plus the interesting price point.
@@OneMarcFifty Thank you for your reply ! However I don't really understand it;; If C7 gets OpenWRT, it will be managed by Luci or SSH, so I don't understand what you meant by "compatibility with linux".... And with "price point", did you mean a good cost-performance ? (preiswert) ?
Hi Marc! Thank you for your time, I always enjoy your videos. 👌👌👌
I've been looking for a kinda powerful router with AX WiFi, at home we have 1Gbps speed and also using it to access remotely for some mini-lab/server personal usage.
So, I want the best speeds as I can get from my connection. At home we have 6/6E enabled devices so we want to take advantage of this too.
I also want to run WireGuard on the own router, but high bandwidth connection + WireGuard may be a resource hog for "home routers"...
If this was your case, would you rather make your own kinda powerful gateway/router like a NanoPi R4S (w/ 2x1Gbps ports) with OpenWRT and install dedicated APs or go for an "all in one" router capable of running WireGuard flawlessly and use WiFi 6 even if it costs more?
Thanks!
Actually I have just recently switched to a home made router with a PC Engines APU4D4 board (X86 hardware) - only problem is that I can't find mPCie hardware for Wi-fi 6 that does support Wi-fi6 in Access Point mode (the AX200's don't)...
@@OneMarcFifty Oh! I may go for 2 UniFi APs running over a PoE switch. But the "router" device I think I'll use some kind of NanoPi R4S or so on. Also APU4D4 looks interesting... Thanks!
@@OneMarcFifty Oh! I may go for 2 UniFi APs running over a PoE switch. But the "router" device I think I'll use some kind of NanoPi R4S or so on. Also APU4D4 looks interesting... Thanks!
Dear, my equipment is BRAND D-LINK DIR-853 HW:A2 FW:1.20, does anyone know how to make Open-WRT work on this equipment?
Hi Anderson, not sure about the A2. Does it have the same hardware like the A3 ? Usually with D-Link devices you use the recovery page to flash
What is the best dumb AP for 2023 leading into 2024?
@OneMarcFifty I have a problem with 2 AP in fast roaming 802.11r and WIFI calling service. When I moved from 1 AP coverage to second in the house, wifi calling deactivated and cannot reconnect in new 2 AP coverage. Are there any parameters that can help?
Great video, can you benchmark Archer AC2600? It is a dual core 1400MHz, 512MB RAM
Hi Khayam, many thanks for the feedback ;-) Unfortunately I do not have a C260 at hand ;-(
nice, do the usb3 routers have working OpenWrt cheap usb3 r8125 2.5Gbit/s drivers so you can add 2 extra faster ethernet?
Hey Paul, there is a module (kmod-usb-net-rtl8152) for this but I have not personally tested it.
@@OneMarcFifty i forget (must check my x86 cards lol) but i think rtl8152 is used for the dual port pcie x1 cards i cant get now rtl8152= dual pcie , *r8125* = usb3 found everywhere still..
there are usb3 & pcie x4 5Gbit/s chips to but double+ the price
Any chance you will use x86 mini pc for router? The price for all in 1 router can get a great spec 2nd hand mini pc. Anyway a new subscriber here :)
Hi, that is absolutely on my roadmap. I have bought an APU4d mainboard from PCEngines which has an AMD processor and 4 Switch Ports - You are right that if you are looking for router functionality (i.e. no Wi-Fi) a small PC is actually the better solution - but an episode on this should follow in January / February latest
Most ath79 targets including the C7 do not support DSA which is pretty disappointing. This may change in the future but as such I don't necessarily recommend it for new openWRT builds.
I do agree that it is disappointing. However, you may still use those devices- just you don’t get DSA
@@OneMarcFifty Also, DSA worsens performance.
I try to install on DIR-2660. What should I do if I cannot enter the web recovery UI? I have already tried to restore the original factory settings.