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Comment by milankragujevic | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, that router costs 28 000 RSD ( https://www.gigatron.rs/ruteri/asus_dualband_wirelessac1900_... ) which translates in EUR to 236 EUR, so your point is not valid for outside of the USA. To get a feel for a router that costs exactly €50, see TP-Link MR3420 V5. Also, the router you mentioned (ASUS RT-AC68U has a dual core 800 MHz Broadcom processor and 256 MB RAM and 128 MB Flash storage, while most routers at 50€ have a 400 MHz Ralink/Mediatek Processor (single core) with 32MB (at most 64 MB) RAM and 4 or 8 MB SPI memory. ) I'm glad you happen to live in a country where you can obtain such a router for so little, I am not so lucky, so I use my ISP provided one that barely manages that 150 Mbps (thankfully with a Gigabit port (yes single LAN port)).

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Yes, this is the discounted price because the hardware is a bit old. However, I think there are some decent affordable routers around the world. More so if you are open to ordering from China. I haven't been following the ultra cheap space too much, but you should definitely check out the forums. There are also APU2 boards (https://www.pcengines.ch/) that may provide a good bang for the buck. There's also old x86 hardware if you don't care about power consumption.

The only thing I've found that is acceptable to me is this: https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_ac2 (or "RBD52G-5HacD2HnD-TC", ... damn, don't they love the long-ass names). 128 MB RAM, Qualcomm processor quad core at 700 MHz (but ARM! :) ) and 5 gigabit RJ45 ports + Dual Band WiFi and a USB port! Plus, even if I can't get OpenWrt to work on it (though I prefer it), I can find my way with Mikrotik's RouterOS. I actually recently setup a PTP link at 3 km with 2 SXTsq's. Though I expected 100 Mbps, it only ended up being 72 Mbps stable, more than that and there's problems with the connection. I liked the old SXT more, you could put OpenWRT on it, the new ones use weird flash memory which OpenWrt can't write to...

edit: forgot to mention, it's 60€ brand new from a friend who works at a WISP

What is " 4 or 8 MB SPI memory "? Why using SPI to qualify memory ? Are you trying to something like SD and friends?

The firmware for routers like this is stored on SPI flash memory, and the size of the SPI flash chip determines how easily you can fit third-party firmware like OpenWRT on the router and how many compromises are necessary to do so. It's soldered on so not really user replaceable.

It's just the interface, serial peripheral interface.

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