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Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

Out of "hundreds" I see 5-7 that look like decent home wireless routers at first glance (4+ gigabit ports, available new, b/g/n/ac, no unsupported hardware when running OpenWRT, <$150).

Based on that the original statement "I still don’t know any good reasonably priced routers which supports Openwrt." is very understandable. A lot of rows != an easy list of good routers.

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Xiaomi Mi WiFi is the best cheap with OpenWRT support

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Xiaomi-WIFI-Router-3-ROM-128...

This does not appear to be officially supported. On top of that, it appears to require one to use Xiaomi mobile software and accounts to set up the router initially prior to any flashing.

It's there, 3G (g as gen, not 3G mobile)

The "3G" model is not the model you linked. The 3G model requires you to flash proprietary firmware and then associate the router with a Xiaomi account using mobile apps for God only knows what convoluted reason. I would not trust this router even with OpenWRT running given the amount of blobs it requires and the hoops Xiaomi makes you jump through in installing an aftermarket OS.

Oops yes wrong link, this is the good https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/9UbBYxq

Well I use it with OpenWRT and it's perfect, no regrets especially for that price

Is this a joke? The WAN and LAN ports (all 2 of them) are 100 megabit.

Oops wrong link, I have that and it has 1 gig ports

https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/9UbBYxq

The TP-Link Archer C7 has been meeting all of those criteria for years and is still readily available for under $70.

Hardware encryption is on the C7 is not supported. If you have fast internet you're capped at 500mbps due to this issue: https://forum.archive.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=53703

I don't see anything on that page about encryption. Are you talking about something to do with VPNs or with WiFi encryption?

The original post, from 2014, states

> I tried using both open (no auth) and WPA/WPA2

meaning even without encryption, the TCP performance with OpenWRT was worse than the original firmware.

I should have been clearer. I was talking about two distinct issues:

* lack of hardware encryption support

* poor network performance (about 50% slower than with original firmware) - the issue I linked to

> lack of hardware encryption support

I don't think that the Archer C7 hardware (or most consumer router hardware) supports any kind of encryption acceleration aside from what's built in to the WiFi radios. If you want a hardware accelerated VPN, you need to either get one of the Cavium-based Ubiquiti routers or something with a relatively high-end processor implementing AES instructions.

The lower routing performance has largely been solved in 18.06 with software flow offloading.

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