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Comment by trustingtrust | Hacker News Reader

The open source community is great and companies like Mediatek have open source drivers too. The problem is by the time a router and its drivers gets to a really stable state, its wifi standard has become old or last gen. The RT3200 for example or E8450 is the one that is trending cause its relatively new and fast hardware with most issues solved. But now thats WiFi 6 and not 6E. By the time 6E routers get stable OpenWrt WiFi 7 will be available. So OpenWRT always trails one generation which is perfectly fine for home users usually.

If you really want something that runs a more recent version of OpenWRT (for security patches) and fast and stable wifi from the latest generation the best solution right now is to use OpenWRT for routing and get some prosumer Access Point. This combination has worked great for me. This is important if you want to deploy in a work environment where wifi needs to be stable and frequent reboots are not welcome.

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I imagine that wi-fi long ago reached a standard of sufficient stability for the vast majority of home users, cafés and restaurants, etc. When I look at the router at friends’ houses or hanging on the wall at businesses, it is often a decade old, and no one complains about drops or having to reboot. (In apartment blocks people may sense that their wi-fi is a bit slow, but merely changing the channel away from the default will often make a big difference.) The many older-generation routers that have reliable and advanced OpenWRT support are perfectly fine for most non-corporate use-cases.

"it is often a decade old"

This is a problem first in terms of security and secondly why ISPs have their own hardware cause people will upgrade their plan and complain they are not getting the speeds because they don't even have the hardware to support it. Firmware bugs in routers are becoming common for DDoS attacks.

One subtle benefit of cutting edge routers, a lot of routers nowadays are WiFI mesh routers. This traditionally was not very good, but at least at the moment a mesh between routers over WiFi 6E (which most devices do not support) works really well.

Shit I’m still using an Apple base station. I kept expecting them to come back. OpenWRT was okay but it is just a pain in the ass to figure out what model works with what version. Too many vendors have been compatible for only certain hardware revisions and I just don’t use enough Wi-Fi for it to be worth the effort. I have Ethernet again after a long time of not having it.

Yep. Our family still makes do with a WRT 54GS v5. A carefully configured DD-WRT installation (man, I did a ton of reading for that :) and memory expanded to 16 MB. Works fairly well, even for single-person Zoom calls and our son's gaming in Minecraft servers (+ Discord blabbering).

As for DD-WRT, my favorite setting is the timer for turning wifi off for the night, and a scheduled restart each morning. I also set the signal strength to as low as I could. This way, the router has been running with no issues whatsoever, maintaining a very stable download rate -- so it sure does make sense to dig in the DD-WRT (or OpenWRT) documentation and wikis.

I admit being somewhat attached to old-but-excellent hardware in general, though, so there's that.

Well, that's only a problem if you're also constantly buying new devices that could use those standards. Eg everything that connects to my home wifi is a/b/g/n max so I just got an old ath9k wifi card for my router.

do you mean to hook those new APs as dumb APs to openwrt router? in that case just buy some wired routers for openwrt to save a few dollars.

for most people the newest wifi standard might not be that critical, any wifi standards after 802.11n worked well for me and they're fairly stable on openwrt.

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