What is your budget?
In general try to go for Asus, they can mesh and are usually reliable.
If you want something more advanced, look into Ubiquiti, though they will be more expensive, also read the reviews for the different components, some POE switches can get quite hot, so if you don’t need it try and avoid it.
I am on Asus, and have had very little issues related to my router the last few years, but have been eyeing Ubiquiti lately…
Asus puts a lot of their advertised features behind accepting terms and conditions that have them harvesting and selling your data. You can not agree to it and still use the device. But many of the advertised features won’t work.
Check out ASUS Merlin, it’s a openwrt reimplementation of most of ASUS closed in features
Running tp-link. So far no issues. Asus is good, tp-link gives you more features on the cheaper models than Asus like vlan if you want it.
I bought an Asus RT-AX53U, it was the cheapest WiFi 6 router with openwrt support
Does openwrt has dual wan support? I’m considering to try openwrt on my asus router, but I currently use its dual wan failover feature.
Of course it does, anyway it’s normal Linux, so it does everything desktop Linux does, you gonna be of course limited by your device hardware capabilities like RAM or storage, so maybe you won’t be able to deploy a kubernetes stack on your home router but it’ll be doable on a more capable device running OpenWRT like an RPi, PC or NAS;-)
I’ve been happy with Asus & TP-Link using openwrt. I’m curious about the Bananapi ones but it could be a hassle & what I have now works.
https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128
for the full list
My recommendation falls squarely on the Omada series from TP-Link. It’s their SMB (small-medium business) offering and its very wallet friendly for what it is. Though WiFi 7 stuff is of course not cheap if you want the bleeding edge. I suggest going with the EAP6 series with WiFi 6E. No need to buy the physical controller, instead DIY a router with opnsense or pfsense and the Omada software for managing the APs is what I recommend. You of course need a switch with PoE like TL-SG2008P. PoE is a game changer for making wiring up the APs easy, and I do recommend wiring them because then you don’t need to think about having a strong signal between the APs.
Criteria being stability mainly, all consumer stuff is much more prone to the occasional drop and just plain wonky ness. Another criteria being upgrade path, the Omada stuff can easily be sold when you upgrade because they retain value pretty well (and you can find them used to start with as well). They also don’t ship with the bloat consumer devices come with. With features you don’t need and router+AP combo is fine if you’re in a single room apartment but it doesn’t scale to a multiroom setup well. I’ve used Asus “AI-mesh” and you really waste more money than you save in my experience.
Don’t get a combined AP and router. Make sure they’re separate. That will get you a lot of quality just by doing that.
I feel like you’re conflating combined devices with consumer-grade ones. I’ve had pretty good experiences with Unifi’s all-in-one offerings.
That’s a good point. I haven’t used unifi’s combined devices. I was under the impression that the radio generally works better when not next to the router but maybe that’s old news.
