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Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

My comment is getting lots of downvotes. I'd argue:

- 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.

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Throughput is hardly the only meaningful performance limitation the Pi has, but it's already enough of a limitation to disqualify it. The RPi really just doesn't come close to being suitable as a router.

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.

"Most home users" are never going to install OpenWRT on anything, RPi, or otherwise. Of those that do, it seems likely that they will max out the throughput of a RPi, especially now that >100Mbps internet is common place is some countries, and is becoming increasingly available in others (like the US).

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.

> 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?

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