On Mon, Feb 26, 2024 at 11:56 AM Eldo Varghese <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hey yall > During the openwrt talk may folks spoke about what hardware they used > and ofcourse Ted's great talk itself was about graphing data from the > individual APs. I had a few thoughts about this that I want to share, if > you will indulge me: > > 1) hardware: Folks mentioned only paying $15 for their AP/home routers > and others were incredulous at this point. I wanted to show my method of > finding such deals: > a) First start at the table of hardware [0] to find a currently > supported enterprise grade hardware that requires some sort of > proprietary system for command and control, where most offices want to > get rid of the hardware once they stop paying annual fees. > We (Personal Telco) did this with Meraki MR24's. They are getting old these days with dual-band 3x3 802.11n radios. We bought several "lots" as the decommissions stacked up in consultants offices and their ebay prices plummeted. We got one batch, iirc, for under $10 per piece. There was a substantial gyration involved with reflashing them (initially about 20 minutes per device, including screwdrivers and serial consoles), but in the end I had a setup that let me plow through them with no screw drivers. Despite being old, the Atheros 802.11n radios still have a warm place in my heart as the zenith in FOSSness in drivers. Ever since, 802.11ac and 802.11ax (aka wifi6) have universally involved closed-source firmware blobs. The impact has been that edge-case driver support has been wobbly in the newer hardware. Lots of people don't care about the edge cases (like adhoc mode for mesh networking), but I do. Personally, for indoor 802.11ac devices, I have had pretty good luck with OpenWrt on the tp-link archer c7 (which I used from 2015 until last summer as my primary AP at home). A year or so I accumulated a decent stack of them from ebay for around $25 each. More recently, I have liked the Linksys E8450 for indoor 802.11ax devices. If you can justify 4 of them at once, you can find them brand new on the Bezone for $70, or $100-ish for onesies. If you are looking for good wifi6 OpenWrt support, apparently the MediaTek radios are the ones right now. My E8450's iwinfo command reports my 802.11ac-equipped laptop has a modulation rate, from 8 feet away: RX: 650.0 MBit/s, VHT-MCS 7, 80MHz, VHT-NSS 2 654848 Pkts. TX: 780.0 MBit/s, VHT-MCS 8, 80MHz, VHT-NSS 2 2449489 Pkts. My more modern, presumably wifi6 cell phone has a modulation rate over a gigabit: TX: 1134.2 MBit/s, HE-MCS 11, 80MHz, HE-NSS 2, HE-GI 1, HE-DCM 0 15402 Pkts. Fwiw. -- Russell Senior [email protected]
