It has two Ethernet ports, no switch. WHY?
Inexplicably can be powered via PoE, makes no sense if its purpose is to hang off your ISP's gateway (which almost certainly lacks PoE supply). PoE feature will never be used. You're not attaching this monstrosity to the ceiling.
It's utterly gigantic due to inefficient PCB layout.
Why is right to repair important for a throwaway router? Given what will usually fail are the hard to source ASICs.
By the time it breaks it will be obsolete anyway. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread they are already working on a successor.
There is so much better hardware out there manufactured in volume for cheaper.
It was likely a fun engineering project for someone but the business case isn't there.
A reference platform makes no sense for OpenWRT as by its nature it runs on dozens upon dozens of different hardware, all which are different and must be tested independently.
Where my use cases don't permit it I won't use this, but if it fits I would rather buy an open-hardware device at ~10x the price of an equivalent proprietary device not out of charity but because that is how much more value it provides to me at equivalent hardware performance.
OpenWrt is vastly superior to the proprietary software in commodity routers. Proprietary software gates software features behind more expensive models, even though the cheap hardware can handle them.
You also get software updates. Your hardware doesn't become a paperweight when the manufacturer refuses to fix a known, actively exploited vulnerability.
You'll get new features, for free.
> You're not attaching this monstrosity to the ceiling. I would hide it, but whatever.
The enclosure is open source as well. You can build/print your own enclosure if you'd prefer, or get any enclosure for the Banana Pi BPI-R4.
They can't just ship a board without an enclosure, because it won't pass certifications.
This is wrong. OpenWRT is fostering several manufacturers that are using OpenWRT as the factory platform for their products. This is a reference design (one of several, this particular one from 2024 is now dated and newer designs are available,) provided by OpenWRT, and they've thoughtfully made it available to anyone that might want one: you can just go buy some with no NDA bullshit and get your developers moving in your lab or doing UI development or whatever. The not-cost-optimized PCB is what you want for this, in addition to the ample RAM+Flash. The "useless" POE is another aspect of this: access points use POE ubiquitously, which is a key OpenWRT use case.
> get your developers moving in your lab or doing UI development or whatever
This is what the industry has been clamoring for among a sea of existing hardware: More garbage UIs glued atop of copy-pasted forgotten hardware.
I am an engineering manager. My job is to poke holes in money-burning projects.
Strange. A good engineering manager would see that "way too big" PoE daughter board design as exactly what one would want in a reference design that you'll use to test and integrate your preferred PoE solution. Power product life cycles are so short and availability problems so frequent that a good engineering manager knows that their engineers will be reworking power solutions almost continuously.
No, this is supposed to replace the ISP-provided junk entirely. It will save you money and close a nasty backdoor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069).
I would love to be able to whitelist which devices are allowed to access the internet during night time hours.
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.
Outside of home-labs, it's rare for me to see any devices connected to the LAN side of a wireless router these days, and more than 1 (i.e. the non-portable device that is closest to the router) is exceedingly rare.
I would assume every gaming desktop computer would be? I actually assumed every desktop would be...
[edit]
If it matters, my mom no longer has a desktop (she uses a docked laptop now), but it is true of the docking station and was true of her previous desktop.
I used one 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.
LinkSys got sued to release the firmware as it was GPL linked. This dump got modified to make the WRT54G way more powerful than LinkSys ever planned but they got to sell the hardware for years more than would have been expected at the time.
OpenWRT runs on a lot of hardware and its a great way to extend the life of a router past the manufacturers patches as well as gain a lot of capabilities. I wouldn't buy a commercial router that wasn't supported by OpenWRT now.
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.
https://openwrt.org/voting/2025-02-12-openwrt-two
Otherwise this router from GL.iNet has OpenWRT preinstalled, Wifi 7, 5x2.5G:
OpenWRT is very good, but the installation and upgrades are not easy. There is a zoo of images for different hardware, installation options and tools. It has to run on small devices, so there are limitations. The documentation on Wiki is scattered and could be improved.
I had to search forums for weeks for a custom package installation for my router. Right now I have been trying to upgrade to the latest version via LUCI for a while, and it stucks. Probably have to wait for few weeks, go through CLI and maybe search forums again.
I just thought I am paying a hefty time price for a bit more expensive x86 mini pc and AP.
I moved from pfSense to OpenWRT due to the really poor IPv6 support in pfSense. I don't use the AP capability either. How are things in OPNSense these days?
Particular pain points from pfSense was that it published global IP as DNS address to LAN clients and no way around it, so connectivity broke every time prefix changed, and no real support for specifying prefix-less firewall rules or similar, so couldn't really expose anything via IPv6 without pain.
I imagine that using an ASIC is way more cost efficient vs using a CPU.
I don't use it for my APs, but that is mostly because I already had 3 TP-Link routers setup as dumb APs using OpenWrt that have been working great. If I did it again, I'd buy OpenWrt Ones though. Although Deco mesh kits I've used have worked exceptionally well, and have become my recommendation for friends/family that don't want to do things like run arbitrary packages on their router/APs.
Been using OpnSense for about 8 years now though... it's just been the best option for me, I use separate commercial AP.
...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.)
The solution is to use image-builder and bake your config into the image.
It's been included in all suitable default image configurations starting with OpenWrt release 25.12.
I do run OpenWrt on my x86-based router, on my AP, and even on my managed switches, and have no regrets.
Yes, it's a possibility, but if you want to tinker, I think a plain Linux distro like Debian is better. Turning it into a router is literally a couple of kernel parameters and a few iptables rules to set up NAT. Nowadays that's less than fives minutes of work with Claude.
This buys you much better performance and hardware compatibility relative to a BSD system, as well as lower resource usage and attack surface (no GUI or other unnecessary additions). WiFi support on BSD is bad, but on Linux you can use hostapd and almost immediately get an access point for free. And of course Linux is also better if you intend to run other stuff on the same hardware.
peddling-brink•1h ago