Linksys - MX4300 (LN1301)

Linksys MX4300, I was in the same boat before I did some research lol

MX4300 got Openwrt support, these never will.

It's a selling point at least ,)

I have a Linksys tri band mesh system (older but meets our needs) and I don't notice any roaming issues, I can walk from the front of the property to the back on a wifi sip phone and not notice and interruption, and I do know I have to cross three AP's to do that, two wired and one wireless back haul

Like what? I don't think anything beats the $14.99 limit 1, or $19.99 limit 3+, for LN1301! That was probably the deal of the century. Only possible because of the huge marketing flop related to Linksys/Fortinet partnership with their *Linksys HomeWRK for Business | Secured by Fortinet* thing during the work-from-home craze!

Woot publicly shows sales stats, and the last few times they had any of LN1301, it was literally 1 or 2 pieces total, open-box, for the entire sale, so, of course they're gone in like a few minutes tops.

An MX4300 running OpenWrt is an absolutely insane value. Easily one of the highest cost/performance ratio devices I've seen on this sub.

I’m sort of tech savvy but even I had trouble setting up openwrt. I was able to get it up and running on 2 out of 3 of my MX4300 and even then I struggled to get the access points set up properly. Gave up and just flashed it back to stock. Works better stock than my 10 year old wireless router.

I bought one of the popular linksys AX4200 kits, as well a couple of the LN1301 units and played around with the mesh setup and it was just trash. And those claim to be tri band. So my question is this, is mesh only worth it if you CAN do you a wired backhaul? I can't really do that in my current place and when I do move I'm just going to skip to a unifi setup.

Honestly, I feel like it should be. The base firmware and interface for the LN1301 is atrociously bad, unresponsive in some places, and lacks a lot of actionable feedback. Openwrt fixed ALL of that. Yes, technically you have to navigate through a bit of an installation which isn't the most newb friendly thing, but neither is any networking activity that isn't literally "plug in power, plug in ethernet cable, everything works without any other intervention." You're already going to have extra steps setting up backhauls and meshes. You might as well do it through an interface that doesn't suck and works very well.

Couldn't agree more. I have 3 in a wired backhaul which is crazy overkill for my 1300sqft house lol but the wifi is immaculate in every single corner

Congrats on your new place:) If you’re into custom setup and control, the Linksys with OpenWRT is a solid pick. But if you plan to add some smart home stuff later, the Eero 6+ with Zigbee and Thread built in might save you some trouble. It just depends on what matters more to you..