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Comment by escanda | Hacker News Reader

This week due a wifi network intrusion I bought a Linksys Wrt3200acm. It looks good on paper and it has two boot partitions so it doesn't brick. I installed a device specific distribution recommended on the forums. Well, the 5ghz wifi range is total crap with Openwrt because the wifi driver is not as advanced as the one shipped by default and with the open source driver it can't transmit at full power.

I ditched Openwrt and installed back the stock firmware. But I am returning this device to Amazon tomorrow.

Which modern device do you recommend?

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It's even worse. Driver development has stopped: https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/commits/master

Many like the R7800. I do not.

The XiaoMi 3G is also a good option. The driver is open source and actively developed. (The USB3 port can cause interference in 2.4Ghz though).

Anything based on ipq806x and ipq4xxx should have excellent WiFi performance. (Including the R7800)

I would recommend a Ubiquti UniFi [1]. Although I'm so pissed off that I can't deeplink to their UniFi product page that I'm almost not making this very post. Which specific one depends on your needs and budget.

[1] https://www.ui.com/products/#

I was a Wisp user for some time so I know the brand and it was a solid device overall. I looked into the UniFi products and the AP plus a controller is almost 100 euros more expensive than the Linksys device. I will look in the future for Ubiquiti devices but I think I am going to use a standard WiFi device (after all it is a one story flat not too big) and perhaps in the future I will buy a barebones so I can run pfsense with the current wifi device as a dumb AP.

You can run controller in the cloud, or on a Raspberry Pi, or on a VM, or ...

Or just on your laptop. The controller is only required for setup, the AP's can run in standalone mode just fine after being setup (they just don't have any user interface to speak of on their own).

If you've got just one AP then you don't even need a controller. I just used their iOS app to set up my UniFi AP.