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Comment by pwpw | Hacker News Reader

I have been looking into using OpenWrt recently since my current router Ethernet is capped at 500mbps on my gigabit internet, but I am overwhelmed by router choices.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a router that can handle 1Gbps internet and also has fairly fast output with clients connecting to it via WireGuard?

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There's actually a sticky post about this kind of situation on the OpenWRT forum. It boils down to: "gigabit routers" aren't; use a SFF Intel box with a separate switch and AP for those speeds. [1]

[1] https://forum.openwrt.org/t/so-you-have-500mbps-1gbps-fiber-...

So from here, which SFF intel box should I look into? I want something relatively energy efficient and quiet.

I don't know if there's a specific name for them, but there's a cottage industry of fanless "network appliances" based on low-power Intel processors, loosely similar to Intel NUC, but with different form factors depending on how many Ethernet interfaces they have. Some of the better-known integrators on AliExpress include Topton, Kingnovy, and Qotom, and you'll find a ton of examples if you search AliExpress for "pfSense". There's also an American vendor, Protectli, that offers several variations of this hardware with a warranty, support, and Coreboot firmware (at a premium over AliExpress prices, of course).

Use a Raspberry Pi 4 for your router and use other ’routers’ as dumb access points. It is the best setup I’ve had.

Its CPU is easily fast enough to handle the advanced software flow control that allows really good QoS. My ping times don’t meaningfully change whether my connection is loaded or not.

Then you can upgrade the wireless without having to replace your router which does all sorts of non Wi-Fi functions.

It does require using an external USB3 gigabit Ethernet adapter.

Unless your ISP uses pppoe. The overhead of encap and decap for every packet overwhelms these little ARM boxes.

Just use BananaPi-R3, it is working great with flow offloading, wireless ethernet dispatch (offloading Wi-Fi). It has great support from Mediatek, achieving ~1.4Gbps over Wi-Fi without any CPU usage. It is really great device and not very expensive. Official support for OpenWRT from 23.05. https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R3

OpenWRT has a list of hardware it will run on: https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128

If you really want to have headroom, get something that claims 10Gpbs or 5Gps or similar.

Do they even have those? I thought that upcoming release just got 2.5G WAN port working in rare cases.

I was considering routing 1gps on the wire - it’s often better to have the actual router separate from the Wi-Fi hotspot.

Check out Unielec U7621-06. I use it, its quite cool device. You can order it directly from Unielec.

Never heard of a 500mbps Ethernet, maybe you are running it in half-duplex mode?

I have the same issue with my router - it supports 1gbps but that’s a total over all ports. That total includes the WAN port. So the max throughout you can get from one port to the internet is half the max - 500 mbps.

Is that really true? With full duplex, you should be able to route 1Gbps in and 1Gbps out simultaneously. Are you sure you aren't just hitting a CPU or ISP bandwidth limit?

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