For 99% of the time, though, it makes no difference. Anything over about 100 Mbps is adequate for a lot of what I do.

If you're paying for gigabit internet and getting 925 Mb/sec through a gigabit Ethernet router, you're doing great. But you need to use a 2.5 GbE-capable router/switch to get advertised speeds.

Decent but sort of annoying to set up; https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/wifiextende... appears to have combined what used to be 2 pages with different instructions, but it still seems to have both sets of slightly different steps. IMHO there really should be a single button in LuCI to make the box just an AP without DHCP/DNS/firewall.

- Switches frequently offer PoE by default whereas routers (especially consumer or PC-grade stuff) would need a PoE adapter

- Devices connected to the switch can communicate directly without the router, saving a hop

- Modern switches may only need to read the first few bytes of the frame before cutting the packet over to the appropriate port, whereas routers tend to need to read the whole packet and apply rules/policy, incurring higher processing costs

An ordinary home LAN may not find any noticeable benefits, but an enterprise setup might benefit.

My router is on a shelf in my unfinished basement, along with the cable modem and a switch, not far from the other household infrastructure. It's a great place for a bunch of cabling (nobody will ever see it unless I deliberately show it to them) and it is trivial to get more wires to that location.

But the basement is a terrible place for a wifi access point, being underground and all.

So for wifi, I've got a fairly unobtrusive access point (a Mikrotik wAP AC) mounted on a central wall on the first floor, with PoE. Unlike the way that home routers are normally used, this access point only has one wire connected to it, and all it will ever need is exactly one wire.

And if I ever want to upgrade that central switch (maybe I grow some plans for some serious NAS usage or something and 10GbE starts making sense), I just... upgrade it. The router stays the same, the wifi stays the same.

If I ever want to make Wifi faster, or add more of it, I just upgrade that part.

All of these components (router, switch, access point) are necessary for the way we commonly use our home networks in 2024. It's nice having things located where they're most useful, and it is also nice being to change individual parts of the system when that is useful.

I’d like to run fully open source network stack if possible myself, though I’m not sure if that possible without moving the goalposts and virtualizing something or doing it in software, and even then I’d have to figure out some kind of boot attestation ideally, thought I'm not sure how that's going to pan out. Isn't Intel SGX/AMD SEV/ARM CCA required for that?

Some links I thought we interesting on that topic, as it's adjacent to the discussion:

> A comparison study of intel SGX and AMD memory encryption technology

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3214292.3214301

> vSGX: Virtualizing SGX Enclaves on AMD SEV

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9833694

What do you suggest? How’s your hat fitting, by the way?

Here's the firmware for the OpenWrt One, if that helps you determine whether it does what you want:

https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=SNAPSHOT&targ...

If you find the answer to your/our questions, please let me/us know!

Sent from my iPhone in Lockdown Mode

For anyone else that's interested, I just noticed that the OpenWrt wiki has some numbers:

https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-mt6000#performance

TFA is a post, a press release really, by Software Freedom Conservancy, of which the OpenWrt project is a member. That said, the post doesn't have a byline, so we can't really point the finger at anyone. I doubt that the OpenWrt project would even characterize the OpenWrt One in the same manner as does the title of the post in TFA.

That said, the title is largely correct to my reading, as other devices that precede the One, like the Turris Omnia, for instance, aren't designed specifically for OpenWrt, but rather a derivative, Turris OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turris_Omnia

https://www.turris.com/en/products/omnia/

To my knowledge, the OpenWrt One is the first router designed specifically for mainline/stock OpenWrt, which is what it ships with, and any comparable router meeting your definition must also meet these marks.

That rules out every Linksys or GL-iNet router ever sold, because they don't ship with stock OpenWrt, regardless of whether or not they run a derivative out of the box, or whether they may be reflashed to run stock OpenWrt, whereas the OpenWrt One disticntly does.

I will admit I could be mistaken on this point or any other made herein, and will happily admit my mistake if so, but as it sits, the burden of proof is on the accuser, which would be you in this case.

So if OpenWrt One isn't first, who is?

The "home network with a NAS" is typically served with a small 4-8p 10G, while the 2.5/5G switches (particularly high density ones) are more of a bridge for orgs that have a lot of AP density and to get more out of that physical cable plant as they upgrade to WiFi 6e/7 devices on those existing wires. Gaming motherboards ship with up to 2.5/5, but again, how many switchports are needed for the SOHO market, especially when users can chain a few smaller switches together?

The price point for mostly/full mGig switches is almost an order of magnitude over what the prosumer/SOHO space prices at. UI offers a 48p but with only 16x2.5 ports at $1300. Cisco Meraki has 48p models with full mGig but that's $7-10k based on Google, and now you're out of prosumer/SOHO and squarely in enterprise platforms.

Ultimately, I do think such switches will pop up, but it'll be a little in the future as those enterprise dollars drive the cost of chipsets and transceivers down. Just not there yet to have that density at SOHO prices.