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Comment by mtarnovan | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know a decently priced router with 802.11ac and hardware encryption that can run OpenWRT? I currently have an TP-LINK Archer C7 with OpenWRT but VPN performance is abysmal. I don't know if my router has any hardware decryption (I would assume not) but if it does OpenWRT can't use it.

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I just found out that the Archer C7 now has support for both Qualcomm SFE and hardware decryption. No official builds yet (all official builds for the C7 are based on kernel 4.9 while SFE requires 4.14), but I found this: https://github.com/gwlim/openwrt-sfe-flowoffload

For me the speedup with SFE is almost x2, haven't tried hardware encryption yet.

With this, I would say the C7 is an excellent router for OpenWRT.

Asus RT-AC58U is well supported by OpenWRT (with a bit more involved installation) that uses a SOC (with 4 core ARM CPU) that is well mainlined so crypto acceleration should work. It is available for 75 €. More information on https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/asus/asus_rt-ac58u

Not sure about hardware encryption but T-Mobile often offer new/refurbished TM-AC1900's for <$40, which you can easily flash to an RT-AC68U. I believe the RT-AC68U has limited support with OpenWRT: https://openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-ac68u, but performance has been really good for me considering the price.

edit: disregard the above. It looks like Broadcom chips can only run on the 2.4 GhZ b/g spectrum.

The might be some good used Ubiquiti devices on ebay.

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