[malcolmputer]

They are really completely different ecosystems, each with their own use cases, but off the top of my head:

1. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically break out the ethernet interfaces, and require a USB>Ethernet.

2. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically have onboard wifi, this means you will be putting all of your traffic over USB, which as AC rollout happens you don't have enough bandwidth/latency with USB 2.0

3. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically have multiple ethernet interfaces.

A "Standard" OpenWRT router has between 2 and 5 onboard ethernet interfaces, a small power efficient processor, and between 1 and 6 onboard high power Wifi interfaces.

Now, Monowall/pfsense can be a great route to go, but even then you don't use an Rpi because you want your interfaces hanging off of PCIe instead of USB.

[ae_keji]

What about the Pi 3?

[malcolmputer]

Looks like the rpi3 may have onboard ethernet and wifi, but it's still just one ethernet (100Mbit to boot) and single band wifi.

The point still stands that a $30 router blows away a rpi in terms of network connectivity (which should matter for a router).

[scottlamb]

Sadly, no, the Raspberry Pi 3 still seems to do everything over the USB bus. It'd make an awful router. See https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/raspberry-pi-3-specs-bench...:

> The Raspberry Pi 3 shares the same SMSC LAN9514 chip as its predecessor, the Raspberry Pi 2, adding 10/100 Ethernet connectivity and four USB channels to the board. As before, the SMSC chip connects to the SoC via a single USB channel, acting as a USB-to-Ethernet adaptor and USB hub.

[mschuster91]

> Sadly, no, the Raspberry Pi 3 still seems to do everything over the USB bus. It'd make an awful router

Not exactly, the BT/WiFi chip is apparently running via SDIO.

But yes, that doesn't help with the Ethernet situation. I don't get why Broadcom, when they already do a custom SoC, didn't include one or two MII lines and use a real Ethernet PHY instead.

[rjsw]

They wouldn't even need to buy in IP for the Ethernet MAC, they already have their own.