The problem Eldo is that currently produced enterprise grade hardware that is wifi6 or wifi7 is almost invariably built to PREVENT people from repurposing it to run OpenWRT. Broadcom long ago hid their stuff and Qualcomm did it with wifi 6. MediaTek, being the small player in the market, is using the Open Source community as a way to gain market share so is still publishing specs but the OpenWRT community is deluding itself if it thinks that if MediaTek ever got to be the size of Qualcomm let alone Broadcom that they would not immediately cease making stuff available.
You also have to know that wifi6 and wifi7 is almost completely pointless in the enterprise space. I just built out a brand NEW enterprise deployment using OpenWRT-driven wifi5 gear - and the simple reality is that the speed most people are connecting to the network anywhere in the building is actually beyond gigabit ethernet speeds. I can connect my laptop at one end of the building and carry it around, opened, SSHed into something, and hop from 5Ghz radio to 5Ghz radio without ever losing my SSH session. The reality is the further the client gets from the transmitter the lower the bandwidth and all wifi radios are limited RF output and the 5Ghz band does NOT penetrate real well, so for good mesh design you want a LOT of radios in the vicinity. This has the natural effect of limiting the number of client radios associated to access points - which is in fact another good thing. So you really do NOT need 10Gbt or even 2.5Gbt interfaces on an enterprise AP. The people who are looking for such things are the home experimenters who think that wifi is like Ethernet. They think "I need 2.5Gb on the interface because I want to do 1440Mbt connections" not realizing that in the enterprise, there's restrictions further up the chain that mean NO client is EVER going to pull more than a gigabit from any server, internet connection, etc. and most clients's will not get much more than 10% of that. Do you honestly think most orgs would build a server capable of handing 10Gbt file serving speeds to even a miserable 50 clients simultaneously? The disk arrays don't exist for that. And enterprises have hundreds of clients. The radio makers of course see this, see that today's wifi7 chips are not any better, practically speaking, than wifi 5 designs, and wonder where their future revenue is going to come from if everyone just stops buying replacement Aps since they don't get any benefit from replacing older Aps with newer ones. So they are currently engaged in the largest FUD campaign in computers today to convince people that wifi7 is better and you must buy new gear. Oh and by the way we can scrape those irritating OpenWRT people off our boot heels so not only can we charge the enterprise for BUYING the radios we can charge them $5000 a year for just USING them. That is in fact what my building would be forking over to Cisco to run it's network of Meraki MR52's if I hadn't said screw you Cisco and flashed all of them to OpenWRT. Oh and don't think you can be a smart ass, pay the $5k once, configure your mesh, then don't ever pay it again and the mesh just runs on autopilot. Using the Meraki firmware that calls home every day, the moment you stop paying the extortion fee to Cisco, the radio bricks itself. That's the reality of today's "enterprise grade" hardware. Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Eldo Varghese Sent: Friday, January 9, 2026 8:09 AM To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <[email protected]>; Russell Senior <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Router recommendations for pending Ziply Fiber upgrade A lot of folks just like brand new hardware. I for one prefer used enterprise grade hardware. Just different values. -Eldo On 1/8/26 16:19, Russell Senior wrote: > I presume you've read this? > > > https://forum.openwrt.org/t/gl-inet-flint-3-gl-be9300-discussions/2184 > 40/161 > > particularly toward the bottom (there is a lot of speculative guessing > towards the top). It's apparently based on an IPQ (Qualcomm Atheros) > SoC. Probably less important if you aren't counting on the wifi > working, but MediaTek has been favored in the last few years due to > their more-FOSS-friendly attitude. And, just to temper my enthusiasm > for the W1700K, the OpenWrt forum thread mentioned earlier has some > people reporting some routing speed issues in the last week, so it's > not fully There(tm) yet. > > As a side note, I've been wandering into the niche world of the ONT > bypass community in the last week or two, which I knew vaguely about, > but never encountered directly before. There are people enthusiastic > about replacing the whole ISP provided ONT (optical network > termination) with an SFP or SFP+ module that they've configured to > look like the ISP's ONT, mostly it seems by cloning the Serial Number. > I have not tried it yet, and indeed it would be awkward because my ONT > is currently outside where swapping electronics in the winter is not > so convenient. ;-) >
