Banana Pi - BPI-R4 Lite Wifi Router board

The OpenWRT One is decent, I have it for the same reason. But maybe the new Flint router with OpenWRT has an even powerful CPU which would allow you to comfortably run CAKE at gigabit speeds and even run Suricata or an application firewall if it was supported. So here are the models I suggest: 1. **OpenWRT ONE** [https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one](https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one) 2. **Flint 3** [https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-be9300/](https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-be9300/) 3. **Banana Pi BPI-R4** [https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana\_Pi\_BPI-R4](https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4) The cheapest and nicer for hackers is the OpenWRT One, open hardware, etc. You also support OpenWRT as a project. It is meant to be good for bufferbloat, but I personally would like a bit more of CPU, maybe additional ethernet ports, but I love the device, also you cannot brick it in most scenarios. The BPI-R4 is the next best option if you are looking at something you can own and have it working without caring about what vendors might do. Next best option after the OpenWRT ONE. You can add Wifi 7 support if you want and it will support insane speeds. The Flint 3 a commercial option, very nice as well, you can probably flash OpenWRT but their os typically is based on OpenWRT with customizations and works out of the box for anything you want. Never had one but I heard good things about the Flint 2 when I was deciding what router to buy, I preferred the OpenWRT ONE in the end.

I tried the BE14 on BPI r4, but couldn't get wifi 7 to work. My pixel 9 can only connect to it with wifi 6.

Can confirm the BPI-R4 (with be14 wifi 7 NIC module) is NOT for the faint of heart. I’m still trying to get mine to play nice with max tx transmit. It seems the current Linux driver (mt7995e) has an issue with setting the max allowed transmit power incorrectly (limiting it to 6-7 dB when it should be capable of 23 dB at 5 & 2.4 GHz). There does seem to exist a patch to the driver that fixes it though that I’m going to play around with.

There aren't any. BPI-R4 would be your only guarenteed option right now, and any other Filogic 880 targets as they come out, since it's under development and mt76 drivers are improving.

Brother let me tell you about my Banana Pi-R4! There are lots of good options out there but this one is my choice, the BPI-R4. It’s got a MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) quad-core ARM Corex-A73 processor and 4/8 GB of DDR4 RAM. Two 10 Gb SFP+ ports and four 1 Gb ethernet ports. For additional hardware support it has one M.2 key for 4G/5G/LTE modem and one M.2 key PCIe3.0 1lane for NVME SSD. It also has a dual minPCIe3.0 2lane interface for the BE-14 Wi-Fi expansion card that supports Wi-Fi 7. With the combination of the MT7988A chip, the speeds of DDR4 RAM, 10 Gb SFP ports, and Wi-Fi 7 it boasts as one of the fastest routers available. You can read in more detail of the specs here if you are interested. [https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana\_Pi\_BPI-R4](https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4)

The best router is obviously the Banana-Pi BPI-R4 which is not for noobs but with all the features you get, it beats anything mentioned in this Reddit. Generally a few Google or Duckduckgo searches will get it up in running 100% with OpenWrt and overlay file system for user files and configurations on extroot on 6.5 GB EMMC partition and a working fan. I went to read up in the Wiki, and studied some good tutorials except for the Banana Pi ones and just compiled an image on OpenWrt's firmware selector. I included the kmod for NVMe SSD and packages for EXTROOT support. Flashing was easy as inserting a Micro SD card that was previously prepared with Linux by extracting the compressed image using a simple gzip command piped to dd command Then  I add a QoS based on qosify and CAKE which has evolved from SQM but with adaptive bandwidth (cake-autorate) using eBPF for traffic clasificación and DSCP marking (different). Two files are all you need and I got them off a forum. I just added stuff to it like CDNs and streaming and gaming servers from a list of address and port that were targetted at MikroTik routers with RouterOS. Ironically, those lists are copy pasteable in the main qosify config and is compatible on OpenWrt but so much on RouterOS .  Top that off with a VPN from Zerotier or Wireguard to link other nodes.