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I usually use tp-link gear for openwrt, it's readily available from our distributor and dirt cheap. Don't just look for recent models, pick your hardware from the openwrt hardware compatibility list based on the specs you need.

If you can disregard the fact that the firmware isn't open source, have a look at www.ubnt.com and www.routerboard.com . Those don't run openwrt, but price/performance and features beat everything else that's on the market. The mikrotik routers are performing so well and have so many features it's ridiculous. If you really need Cisco, you'll know. If you're not sure, get a mikrotik, it will cover everything you'll ever need.



Agreed... You really cannot beat TP-Link for the money, and the vast majority (but not all!) of their routers are OpenWrt supported.

I buy literally thousands of them for work (we re-purpose them as network measurement devices, running OpenWrt), and the models we use are as follows:

* TL-WR741ND - 100M ports (can saturate the WAN link).

* TL-WDR3600 - 1G ports (LAN-WAN can hit around 500Mbps with careful tuning, but I don't know how that changes when NAT is enabled)

* TL-WDR4900 - 1G ports (LAN-WAN can hit around 900Mbps, and that's even without using the NAT co-processor, which OpenWrt doesn't support)

Ones I would avoid - WR1043ND (very popular, but old now - it was the precursor to the WDR3600), WDR3500 (100Mbps ports - yuck), WDR4300 (very little difference to the WDR3600, but more expensive)

The TL-WDR4900 really is blindingly quick, largely because it has a PPC CPU inside rather than the MIPS CPU, but it's also double the price of the 3600.

Unless you need the horsepower, the TL-WDR3600 really is the way forward.

I would avoid the 802.11ac models at the moment; they're more expensive, and there's no 802.11ac driver for OpenWrt yet, so you'd be wasting your money.


Seconded. I use the 3600 with Gargoyle OpenWrt (www.gargoyle-router.com, basically a web interface to OpenWrt) and it's been nothing but great.


It looks like the TL-WDR4900 is not MIPS and has half the flash as before. I'm not sure if that changes anything.


Man what about the TL-WR841N it's only 19$ on amazon right now??


That's valuable advice here, thanks for sharing.


I did not know that. I suppose Sam Knows ;)?


The Ubiquity EdgeRouter stuff is (mostly) open source, as its a fork of Vyatta. Under the hood, its Debian with Vyatta's open source CLI and Ubnt's web UI.

Anyway their hardware is excellent...




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