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