Recently the ath10k driver got a lot better. I wanted to determine which mainstream routers used this wireless chipset in an attempt to find a suitable modern replacement for all-in-one router situations to replace the awesome Netgear WNDR3800 that I used tons of for many years.
My requirements
- uses ath10k
- uses ARM (no MIPS, etc) and 2+ cores
- is supported in OpenWRT 19.07.2
- is an all-in-one router (isn’t an AP, range extender, SBC, etc)
- isn’t a no-name brand, I want it to be highly available because this helps to obtain it, for it to be a reasonable price, for there be a good used/refurb market for it (refurb WNDR3800s were $20!), and also results in potentially better OpenWRT support since more hackers have them.
- is available for sale
Using those requirements narrows it down a lot. Here’s the list for 2-cores and 4-cores:
4 core¶
- Asus RT-AC58U
- Asus Lyra (MAP-AC2200)
- Asus RT-ACRH13
- Linksys EA6350 v3(civic)
- ZyXEL NBG6617
2 core¶
- Linksys EA8500 v1
- Netgear R7500 v2
- Netgear R7800
- TP-Link Archer C2600 v1.0, v1.1 (WARNING: there are apparently versions of this that use a different SOC that doesn’t work!)
- ZyXEL NBG6817
TODO: lookup prices, read openwrt pages about them, etc and figure out which are OK
Notes¶
- Refurb Linksys EA6350 are $35 on amazon. But reading the openwrt ea6350v3 page this devices might have some issues.
- the WAN and LAN ports are shared and internally use VLAN1 and VLAN2 to separate things
- configuring VLANs can’t be done with luci
- the switch is limited to 1gbit total bandwidth
- the network ports may lock up if you hit them with more traffic than that
- rt-ac58u: has a warning that the device’s 128mb of RAM might be limiting, also has the VLAN issues mentioned for EA6350
- EA8500: $76 used
