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Why do they always have to look like some unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider? What happened to a plain unassuming looking piece of industrial hardware...

Hey, I think this is important, Flint 3 relies on a Qualcomm chipset, so, at least some weeks ago, no vanilla OpenWRT was available for it (Qualcomm kernel).

On the other hand, if you can live with Wifi 6 and only 2x2.5Gbps ports (and 4x1Gbps), Flint 2 is powered with a Mediatek chipset, that runs a 100% vanilla OpenWRT.

Both are 1GB RAM, 8GB emmc little beasts that can even run some docker containers. IMHO Flint2 is in the top 5 for SOHO OpenWRT supported routers

Latest speculation would be that they don't have a manufacturer anymore https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/1rnr0sv/what_happe...

In my opinion, get the Flint 2, the Flint 3 doesn't work with vanilla OpenWRT (but it does work with GL.iNet's OpenWrt fork). Then again, I don't need the 5x2.5G ports or Wifi 7 since my internet only goes to 1G.

> https://openwrt.org/voting/2025-02-12-openwrt-two

Glinet are doing a great job with their routers. I have the Beryl AX which is fully openwrt compatible. The new Beryl 7 is also fully compatible now. Mediatek chips might not be as high performance as Qualcomm but they make up in openness.

Edit: They just announced Flint 4 with a Mediatek chip:

https://www.gl-inet.com/en-gb/products/gl-be14000

I have really liked my GL.iNet travel router, also with OpenWRT. I didn't think I would need a travel router but they're pretty handy.

I didn't realise routers like theirs existed, and had been paying through the nose for your standard brands like TPLink and hoping it didn't get popped.

Would you be able to set this up as a simple mesh with two units?

I have two old Amplifi HD units in wireless backhaul mesh that I’d like to upgrade

Gl.Inet ships with their openwrt version. I have the last version and it can be flashed to vanilla openwrt or one a high speed branch. It’s been good and fast. I don’t need wifi 7 yet so I have time.

> expected availability is late '25.

T-T. Any update on the timeframe (and presumably also I would expect the expected price to be solidly in the mid to high 300s at this point)?

deleted.

Less congestion in WiFi dense environments like apartment buildings due to the additional bandwidth and improved efficiency

Screw the max theoretical bandwidths for marketing, without 6 GHz (which would need 6E or 7) and the improved airtime efficiency I can barely get a few hundred jittery mbps standing next to my AP because the airspace is so crowded where I live.

>I've got 10Gbps fiber at home (egregious, I know), and the only OpenWRT router I found that can saturate it is the Turris Omnia NG[0]. The price tag is a notch up from others but it's legitimately one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever owned.

Why not use OPNsense on a mini PC?

Is this actually stock OpenWRT?

I mean is it supported by vanilla OpenWRT image?

I do like the board though.

> OpenWrt is a great piece of software(firmware) to prevent ISPs selling your browsing data to the advertisers.

Huh, how? Either ISPs are doing deep packet inspection, and can track your browsing data regardless of what firmware you run, or they don't, and it still doesn't matter what firmware you use on your switches/routers, you ISP still won't be able to see TLS traffic, which most internet traffic is today.

I just bought a house and this was the conclusion I came to. A cheap PoE-capable multigig switch and a single Omada access point cost about the same as a cheap WiFi 7-capable router would have. I did opt to run the Omada Controller software on a Raspberry Pi instead of buying a hardware controller (to save a few bucks); maybe if I had a lot more hardware it'd make sense but for my one AP it's more than capable. So far I'm quite pleased, it gives me the peace-of-mind knowing that WiFi upgrades are effectively plug-and-play - plug in the AP, adopt it in the controller, add it to the site, and the existing network is already being broadcast - no more router reconfiguration every few years!

The other devices based on the same filogic chip do have dual 2.5Gbps at least.

You can get a Wifi 7 device and 2x2.5GBps with Wifi 7 support already with the Asus BT8 and a few other devices. Asus's bootloader firmware flasher will take the initial OpenWRT image so its really quite simple to get going.

I'm hoping for one with at least two 10Gbps ethernet ports (one for upstream, one for downstream). Ideally more, but two would be great.

Yeah it was so popular they even released a specific WRT54GL model (where the L stands for Linux) in order to keep supporting third-party firmware after the main hardware series moved on to a more optimized VxWorks-based OS that let them ship less RAM and Flash.

A mainstream hardware company releasing a specific product SKU to support third party firmware really sounds crazy from the perspective of the current market where a substantial portion of the value in selling hardware is supposed to come from subscriptions and surveillance.

Yeah, I loved it because it allowed me to boost the signal above FCC-approved power requirements and saturate my house with that sweet 2.4GHz connection everywhere.

Yeah, Linksys made a killing from this and the WRT54GS 2.0 because of OpenWRT.

I miss the Tomato UI/UX... I don't care for LUCU or OpnSense's UI by comparison...

Been using OpnSense for about 8 years now though... it's just been the best option for me, I use separate commercial AP.

The best model of the WRT54G line. I would snag them at thrift stores for cheap to use for silly utility functions. I always referred to that particular model as "The highly-coveted WRT54GL."

I used a pair to provide Internet access at a Customer's construction site back in 2010. Cell phone hotspot wasn't a thing for me yet. We took a pair of WRT54Gs, configured one as a WiFi client, the other as a bog-standard router/AP, connected the LAN from the client to the WAN on the router/AP, pur a directional antenna onto the "client", and pointed it down the road toward a big business who offered free WiFi for Customers. We leeched off that until the real Internet service got installed. (It was a restaurant and we ate there at least once so we were Customers, right? >smile<)

Used to work for that model. Great device for it’s time.

Wireless Router or Wireless Router Technology is the common interpretation, but to my knowledge, Linksys has never officially confirmed this.

Hi I tried with OPNSense, but I use a screen reader they made a big song and dance about fixing 11y on there web interface. In the end they did fuck all. OpenWRT has bin good with a screen reader since the start and the few times I have pointed out things to be fixed they have bin fixed with in days. So yeah go OpenWRT.

I don't disagree, however using an old PC as a router almost certainly wastes an enormous among of power. An old non-gaming PC could use 70kWh of power a month if running continuously (as a router would), which is around 11 a month and almost 140 a year. At that price you could just buy a nice router, or an OpenWrt One which will possibly also have newer, faster WiFi standards (WiFi 6)

It's worth being careful here: a lot of the affordable enterprise-class routers from 10+ years ago aren't as fast as cheap consumer hardware - like the OP or just a decent mini PC. The primary arguments for the enterprise-class gear are around feature availability and certain aspects of reliability (redundant power/fans, better heat tolerance, higher quality components). It's also worth remembering that this kind of gear tends to be built for dedicated environments: loud fans, higher power draw/lack of power saving features, etc.

Beside the potential performance and environmental issues the other big downsides tend to include firmware availability - either because download from the site requires a login on the vendor's site or, increasingly commonly, the gear has hit LDOS and images just aren't posted. Obviously there are other "unofficial" places for such images, but the risk/legality are a whole other (potentially serious) question.

There's an additional issue mapping the requirements of home networking to enterprise gear: Ethernet switches are lousy firewalls (little or no NAT, primitive built-in security, DLNA/mDNS and friends aren't really sane options, etc). Finally, even at "1/5" the price the gear may still be quite a bit more expensive than other options. And if it's not expensive, it's usually because nobody wants it any more because of the issues mentioned above (being near- or beyond- LDOS).

FWIW this is from someone who literally built a commercial-class machine room in his house with dedicated AC, subpanels, commercial UPS, etc for data center class Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Infiniband switching as well as carrier-grade routers and still runs "enterprise" grade WLAN and switching and can lay hands on as much as I could reasonably want without too much drama or cost... Going down this road can absolutely be amazing if you either have a.) the background to properly source and run the hardware/software or b.) have a driving desire to learn how to do so or c.) have some very atypical requirements for home networking. Otherwise it tends to not be something to be done lightly.

Aren't they also missing security patches? I'm not sure about you, but I'd rather have SOHO routers with up to date firmware, than enterprise routers with out of date firmware.

So an image released in March? I’m not sure I’d proclaim it completely solved when it’s been ga for all of three months.

Indeed, I was referring to Attended Sysupgrade in luci or CLI.

What switches are you running it on?

All of that is a nope. The solution is that a router should have a standard unattended upgrade system built into it that is on by default and pulls from the stable release stream, preserves your configuration automatically with a 100% guarantee of it working, automatically falls back to the last known working image if the update fails, and has a way to notify you of what’s going on with it. This must work out of the box with the first install without you having to do anything at all or even be aware of it except perhaps setting the time of day and day of week/month when the router is allowed to reboot itself for the upgrades (but the default should be set automatically by the system). Anything less than that is simply broken for anything that is considered production quality. Words like “image builder” and “config baked into the image” are for those developing the system, not end users.

Maybe so. The documentation seems to be all over the map, and the GUI suggests using "attended sysupgrade" for upgrades.

...which I tried doing, a week or so ago, for a minor point release update within the 25.12.x series. And then the router went out to lunch and didn't come back.

Getting it going again wasn't so bad as such things go. My router has a huge advantage here in that it's a Raspberry Pi 4, so it's easy to remove/replace/re-do the flash device and start over.

(Except: I get all out of sorts when I need to do Internet stuff to fix my Internet connection while that Internet connection is absent.)

But what if you don't want to tinker? I switched to OPNsense as a direct replacement for our Asus "WiFi routers", and it has been phenomenal, reliable, and does everything needed - when you just want it to work, it really just does. But when you want more advanced functions, there are tons of plugins and stuff that you can run natively, while still having a true CLI.

I suppose it comes down to what you said - "if you intend to run other stuff on the same hardware." Is it a good idea to run all sorts of extra stuff on your literal firewall/router? And if you did, I'd assume using a hypervisor is safer anyway? That way you can have the GUI and reliability of OPNsense but have a Linux distro beside it.

You also said that Linux has much better performance vs BSD, which seems rather far fetched. Got any data for that?

One other thing: OPNsense comes with a ton of helpful rules to eliminate bot traffic, allow IPv6, different NATs, VLANS, etc which you'd have to add manually. Not the end of the world, but worth considering.

Please support your claim about (networking) performance of BSD-based systems and Linux with some source(s). It surprised me. Thank you.

Thats more or less what I did, and nix just made sense for the job. For 99% of people I'd say no its not worth it to tinker, just go with opnsense virtualized so you get at least some the benefits of the better linux drivers. By that I mean NBASE-T on various intel chips and while intel's igb is fairly solid on unixes many other vendors' drivers are less so. However if you're willing to figure out configuring per your needs you definitely can get a lower latency router with all the same capabilities and more, with it's components more sanely isolated via containers.

Some people want a webinterface tho.

They maintain their own fork and they say that they contribute stuff upstream (not sure how much, though).

Last time I checked (a couple years ago), it seemed that I could use OpenWRT but I would lose some functionality (was it the FTT maybe?).

Blocky/pihole type stuff is what comes to front of mind, which probably fits but add anything else and now you’re hitting the limit.

I have it going into a 16-port gigabit switch, which my OpenWrt-based APs and wired devices are hooked into.

I do it the opposite way, disable my kids' devices at night, but I suspect your desired method would also be supported using native features. I have found LLMs to be very helpful in providing the right settings.

There is a plugin marketplace that provides more features, like ad-blocking. I haven't played with those yet, so I cannot vouch for them.

I know, and I have, however, I would prefer a ultra-low-power arm-based platform.

$200.93 shipped in April 2024 with a wall bracket. No storage or ram though, but it was cheap at the time.

>Outside of home-labs, it's rare for me to see any devices connected to the LAN side of a wireless router these days

I would assume every gaming desktop computer would be? I actually assumed every desktop would be...

Chaining a switch off the gateway is the best way to do it anyway. If you do that, then when you reboot your gateway, your lan devices do not lose their physical link and can continue talking to each other.

2.5 is the WAN, so your lan is only getting 1g anyway

It does raise the question that if it is for developers, what exactly is being developed? Especially if its not representative of hardware that is available or desired; is there some advantage targeting a very particular chipset? This seems to be the only device using it (from what i could find briefly)

While they're okay on paper, they managed to burn a lot of customers in regards to the add-on wifi 7 module.

Quite a few of the modules went out without their eeprom programmed correctly, and all of them appear to be plagued by quite mediocre performance from (alleged) inadequate RF shielding on the card.

It looks like they've revised the design, but it's peeved off quite a few of the Banana Pi/Sinovoip customers who have bought them with the intention of using it as a router/ap with their R4. (It's dual-PCIe fingers with unique spacing and requires out of spec PCIe voltages, so it's only practically usable with a BPi R4.)

At the very least, the customers using them as wired-only routers are likely to be having a slightly better experience.

Thanks :) Yeah, the router is defiantly further in the future to, as it additionally requires CPU integration for run the software stack, switches are the first order of business.

Can I do a "hold my beer" moment ? https://github.com/Essenceia/ethernet_switch_asic

https://frontier.com/shop/internet/fiber-internet/7-gig

7gig WAN is widely available residentially at a reasonable cost.