While I'm excited about OpenWrt, why wouldn't the ecosystem move to Raspberry Pi at this point, considering that a Pi and multiple wireless NICs can be purchased for much less than a typical access point?
1. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically break out the ethernet interfaces, and require a USB>Ethernet.
2. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically have onboard wifi, this means you will be putting all of your traffic over USB, which as AC rollout happens you don't have enough bandwidth/latency with USB 2.0
3. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically have multiple ethernet interfaces.
A "Standard" OpenWRT router has between 2 and 5 onboard ethernet interfaces, a small power efficient processor, and between 1 and 6 onboard high power Wifi interfaces.
Now, Monowall/pfsense can be a great route to go, but even then you don't use an Rpi because you want your interfaces hanging off of PCIe instead of USB.
The point still stands that a $30 router blows away a rpi in terms of network connectivity (which should matter for a router).
> The Raspberry Pi 3 shares the same SMSC LAN9514 chip as its predecessor, the Raspberry Pi 2, adding 10/100 Ethernet connectivity and four USB channels to the board. As before, the SMSC chip connects to the SoC via a single USB channel, acting as a USB-to-Ethernet adaptor and USB hub.
Not exactly, the BT/WiFi chip is apparently running via SDIO.
But yes, that doesn't help with the Ethernet situation. I don't get why Broadcom, when they already do a custom SoC, didn't include one or two MII lines and use a real Ethernet PHY instead.
That's for a single connection before you even get to NAT/firewalls/IPv6 and VPNs.
Note that I haven't put the Pi3 through its paces yet but the extra CPU and RAM won't completely compensate for the USB/Ethernet limitations.
But as others said, I can't imagine a Pi having anywhere near the throughput of the commodity AC APs I use at home at this time.
That's great in that it means relatively frequent upgrades. Though at this point, the RPi3 is a very unbalanced system. Particlarly, as others have noted, with regards to network I/O.
Router platforms are tied to the lifecycles of networking standards. The underlying standards change much more slowly, roughly ~5-10 years for major changes. The router SoCs and WiFi chips change somewhat more quickly, but not as quickly as consumer electronics SoCs.
This slow rate of change is probably a good thing for OpenWRT/LEDE, because it means that there is more time for software support to mature for each hardware generation.
I don't see how it relates at all to one hardware vendor, with rather terrible track record on all things networking to boot.
But, the idea that it can run on a variety of platforms is one of the benefits. Rpi, for example, would be an odd choice as a base for a commercial hardware product, due to availability in volume, form factor, etc.
However, it would be great if the *wrt projects could adopt the standardized update mechanism that OSMC has leveraged. It's made upgrading so much less painful.
Personally, I use ddwrt and would like to see that project take the charge up on this.
- All the routers (buffalo, linksys) I've installed OpenWRT on have ended up being fairly unstable and have required reboots. The only consumer grade wifi router I've tried that seems stable is the Apple Airport Extreme.
- Most home users never come close to maxing out the throughput a pi can offer.
- If not a pi, perhaps another open hardware device -- seems like one could be sold for under $50 with nic support that addresses all the max USB bandwidth concerns (it may already exist).
- All the complexity of installing on random wifi router hardware (version maintenance, minimal storage space, etc.) seems prohibitive compared to the simplicity of a pi, risk of bricking the router, etc.
Any open hardware device that is suitable for wireless router duty and fits within a $50 budget would have to be essentially a standardized PCB for a single-band Atheros ath9k SoC. It would provide almost no benefit over the dozens of commercial off the shelf products that use those chips and almost universally run OpenWRT flawlessly.
The complexity of installing on any random device is almost entirely with determining what exactly is inside that device, since basically every vendor routinely changes everything inside the product without changing the model number. OpenWRT already has the infrastructure that solves the version maintenance problem, since they do automated builds of the OS and packages for all the various supported hardware platforms. Automatic updates have been implemented by at least a few sub-projects and are being held back mostly by the storage space problem. The hardware vendors are in the process of transitioning from NOR flash to NAND flash, so that problem will take care of itself over the next few years.
The risk of bricking a router is probably a lot lower than you think it is. With almost everything, it's truly hard to screw up to an extent that flashing over TFTP won't fix. A lot of mainstream hardware is significantly more robust that that; I have a bottom of the barrel D-Link that provides a web interface in its bootloader for rescue flashing.
There are some RPi like boards with a single GigE, but they suffer from having smaller developer communities, and still come up short on IO when compared to a networking platform, which will typically have 1-2GigE lanes to the SoC, integrated 2 or 3 stream 2.4 GHz WiFi and a 1-2x miniPCIe interfaces.
Right now, probably the cheapest most capable router is the Ubiqti EdgeRouterX for $50 (no wifi though). It has a 2 core/4 thread MIPS CPU that can do ~1Gbps NAT/ROuting with hardware offloads and ~500Mbps just using the CPU and DMA hardware.
Wow! What do you think is the best one that does do wifi?