[benlumen]

I did a Networking BSc and so for the longest time, used aftermarket / open source routers. The last one being a Linksys running openWRT (ACS1900, or something).

I spent countless hours messing with that thing trying to get decent performance out of it, and simply couldn't.

The router provided for free by my ISP is superior in real world usage.

I get the principles in play here with privacy and security and open source etc., but in practice it's a fight I'm done with. Just give me internet that works well out of the box so I can forget about it.

[larntz]

I'm using openWRT on a Zyxel Armor Z2 router. Today they are $170 on Amazon.

The flashing process was exactly the same as the factory firmware. After that I had to configure it just as I would any new router.

It's better than the factory firmware in every way except user friendliness, but even that isn't bad unless you are trying to something more advanced.

The CPE from Comcast was so much slower and worse in every single way. Now it only acts as a modem for the Zyxel.

An important part of my experience is that I deliberately set out to buy a good router that was very well supported by openWRT, because in the past I have had experiences similar to your post (but with dd-wrt in the long long ago).

I really believe if you plan the project like you would a production project you'll have an extremely good experience.

That said, I did have a number of non-standard things I wanted to do on my home network without paying thousands for enterprise level hardware so it was worth it for me to do that work. If I was just getting on line with a couple computers, phones, and tv's I wouldn't have bothered to flash with openWRT.

[Scoundreller]

> The router provided for free by my ISP is superior in real world usage.

I’m impressed. The ones issued by Rogers in Canada are all-in-one-units and complete garbage.

I think they want your mobile phone to drop its wifi to chew through your $10/gb data, prevent sharing with your neighbours and minimize your peak utilization speeds to cut their network spend.

But you probably live in a country where ISPs compete for your business.

[gnabgib]

Hopefully they'll get better when they buy out their biggest competitor (Shaw) /s

[fzil]

the coddling of our dairy and telecom industry is frankly ridiculous. I was hoping that some American company would enter the Canadian Market but that doesn't seem like something that will happen anytime soon.

[pseudosavant]

I'm a huge OpenWRT fan, but it definitely isn't easy to figure out a reasonably priced router to use it with where you'll get good Wi-Fi performance. I usually stick with the same model recommendation for quite a while.

I get that OpenWRT doesn't want to favor one brand over another, but it'd be really nice if their homepage had a list of 5-10 routers that are really solid with the latest OpenWRT release.

[dont__panic]

My last router experience with openwrt ended up with me installing a random PR's staging build on my router because that was the only version of openwrt I could find that supported my router's chipset. And then I eventually just upgraded to a completely different router because I couldn't solve the bufferbloat issues created by a gigabit connection without hardware performance improvements.