Today, we at SFC, along with our OpenWrt member project, announce the production release of the OpenWrt One. This is the first wireless Internet router designed and built with your software freedom and right to repair in mind. The OpenWrt One will never be locked down and is forever unbrickable. This device services your needs as its owner and user. Everyone deserves control of their computing. The OpenWrt One takes a great first step toward bringing software rights to your home: you can control your own network with the software of your choice, and ensure your right to change, modify, and repair it as you like.
The two things that decide this device is not for me:
WiFi 6 when 7 is already in the shops. The wifi portion of the router will be obsolete very soon.
I need one uplink and 3-4 ethernet ports. Consumer WiFi routers have this.
So I’m just staying patient for my eventual upgrade from WiFi 5 to 7. I’d been more interested in a non brickable OpenWrt 1+4/8 ethernet device and get me a separate WiFi bridge.
I’m not sure WiFi 6 will be “obsolete” in even 10 years, let alone ‘soon’. I’m still using AC just fine at home. If your ISP sucks as much as most, you won’t benefit from much anyway. Maybe the new frequencies could help for apartment dwellers, or the intranet speeds could help if you transfer a lot to and from a home NAS?
I agree that “obsolete” is an exaggeration, but from my point of view I’m making an upgrade from WiFi 5. WiFi 7 has way better throughout and possibly better real life coverage than 6, so I have no reason to settle with WiFi 6 when 7 is about to be readily available. I live in an apartment with plenty of competitors for the frequencies with good internet speed and plenty of NAS-ish use. And as mentioned, I was only sharing my personal reasons for why this isn’t a box for me. Maybe it is great for you and I’d be happy to learn more about your use case.
My use-case is quite basic: a single combined home server/NAS, and two remote workers. My biggest obstacle, historically, was buffer bloat, which really really annoys me in video calls. I’ve got it to an acceptable level these days but it still isn’t ideal.
In a perfect world, I’d have a single home server box that does wifi, routing, NAS, jellyfin, DNS, movies, freshRSS, backups, and a few other tasks. And then I’d eventually build another and mirror data between the two in another location for redundancy. But I haven’t found anything that can handle it on mostly FOSS, long-term-security-updated software (10 years minimum), with no required subscriptions, with easily repairable or replaceable hardware. This seems to be getting really close, though! Official openVPN support for a piece of hardware would go a long way. I made a mistake buying a router in the past with a poorly supported CPU and I don’t want to make a similar mistake again.