Old but relevant, I have used an espressobin as a router for years and the performance I am getting is similar to much more expensive semi-professional routers. https://blog.tjll.net/building-my-perfect-router/
[1]https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_single-board-computers
[2]https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/category...
personally I'd way rather have a system that boots a good Debian rather than openwrt, & the espressobin will fair many times better/be much easier than many of these openwrt-centric alternatives. and it will happily run openwrt too. this line of chips from Marvell has done a good job over the years keeping good upstream/mainline kernel & u-boot support. whereas openwrt often good es out of itcs way with out of tree patches to support all kinds of difficult hardware environments.
My suggestion wasn't a debian vs OpenWrt one, But rather a 'If you like OpenWrt, then you got SBC options too'.
Anyone know of any?
https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_lte_modem_supported
It looks like this table is neither current nor complete though. And there's a different table of OpenWRT compatible devices that have a battery as well.
> [The Amarok (GL-X1200) Industrial IoT Gateway has] 2x SIM card slots for 2x 4G LTE modems (probably miniPCI-E so maybe upgradeable to 5G later), external antenna connectors for the LTE modems, MicroSD, #OpenWRT: https://store.gl-inet.com/collections/4g-smart-router/produc...
The Turris Omnia also has 4G LTE SIM card support (and LXC in their OpenWRT build). https://openwrt.org/toh/turris/turris_omnia
There's also a [Dockerized] x86 build of OpenWRT that probably also supports Mini PCI-E modules for 4G LTE, LoRa, and 5G. Route metrics determine which [gateway] route is tried first.
From "How much total throughput can your wi-fi router really provide?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26596395 :
> In 2021, most routers - even with OpenWRT and hardware-offloading - cannot actually push 1 Gigabit over wired Ethernet, though the port spec does say 1000 Mbps
Also interesting are the NanoPi R2S and R4S at https://www.friendlyarm.com
Especially those by PCEngines are designed for that job; I've used their Wrap boards in the past as firewalls with PfSense and they were rock solid.
No affiliation with any of them, just a satisfied customer.
Big fan.
https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/apu2-1-gigabit-through...
For me, I've discovered the excellent Supermicro X10SLM+-F motherboard. I've bought them off eBay for as little as $145 with 32 gigs of ECC RAM and a 4-core Xeon E3-1220v3 included. Every one I've grabbed runs flawlessly. That board uses around 25w at idle with the BMC running, and can host more than just a pfSense VM. You still have to supply a case and a high quality PSU (don't skimp here!), but those don't have to break the bank.
(If you want to run your router in a VM and pass the LAN controllers through to it, I can recommend the X10SLM+-LN4F, which adds two more gigabit ports. Pricing should be similar.)
If I had to do this on a tighter budget, I have tried OpenWRT on an Rpi4 and it was definitely workable. Didn't have a few features I was looking for, and I was already running a Supermicro anyway for other workloads, so I went back to using a pfSense VM, but YMMV.