Boy am I glad I replaced stock firmware with OpenWRT the moment my router came out of box last week. It was also extremely painless experience, and I'd really recommend people to buy routers with OpenWRT support, even if they cost a little more. A router is something you buy for a decade or more, and it's worth the investment. Our livelihood depends on network availability, and depending on whims of terrible router firmware is not something to rely on.
the best part about it is Diversion and Skynet, a set of scripts that allows you to adblock inside your router (preventing even in-app ads from loading), and an actually viable outbound firewall
seeing weird IP addesses pinging my router from the outside is normal, but when i see something _inside_ my network trying to get _out_, that's when I know it's time to start reformatting
Seconded. I used Merlin before I switched to ubiquiti. My only issue with Merlin was intermittent problems with ipv6 router advertisements which caused connectivity issues. I’ve never had an issue since switching to an edgerouter.
If your use case is you want IoT isolation, the standard advice is to just use separate SSID's.
If you are using one of the routers that has true VLAN support like the AX86U Pro, there are anecdotal reports of people getting it to work but it's hacks and workarounds.
> Boy am I glad I replaced stock firmware with OpenWRT the moment my router came out of box last week.
I have had an Asus for years and use the vendor firmware, and update it semi-regularly when I remember to, and have never had an issue.
I bought an Asus because they have decent capabilities out-of-box, but also because there is the option of using third-party firmware (which I've never bothered to do).
Even with this event I'll probably stick with the OEM firmware.
I'm like you, Asus router on stock firmware and happy. In my case I set that up after a bad experience with openwrt.
Years ago I bought a $100 gigabit Linksys router, immediately flashed it with openwrt, and set it up. I assumed my isp was the reason my download speeds were struggling to hit 100mbps (new house and network all at once), and later when I bought my first NAS I assumed hdds are just inherently slow.
I had abysmal network performance for over a year before I figured out my gigabit router was the performance bottleneck, my isp was giving me 3x what the router could handle. The reason for the terrible performance was that openwrt doesn't have the closed source binary blobs to run hardware accelerated routing, instead everything gets squeezed through the cpu, and my router couldn't do it.
So basically, many routers lose performance, in my case I got a 10x performance drop, and openwrts website is all but useless for telling you which routers to buy.
All I can say is be careful blindly installing openwrt unless your router has a CPU that's complete overkill for what you want to do...and none of the mid range consumer combined routers/access points meet that criteria.
If you read the article it was not a firmware issue, it was one of the security features it has downloaded an invalid config due to ASUS staff errors, the config caused the router to run out of available storage space and soft-brick. There was no firmware issue, any device will start crapping out when it runs out of available storage.
Even if it turns out (once this event has been fully understood) that the vendor-installed firmware "phoned home" to collect an update of sorts that led to this?
Looking at it in a shallow way I suppose one could say that. But to me there's a great distinction between a switch/router and e.g. a smartphone or desktop browser.
Switch/Router, IMO, is a bigger reason to have automatic pull/updates.
You're looking at your phone on a day to day basis. Using your desktop. The router/switch/lightbulb/etc? All stuff that sits in the background and gets forgotten. Those things should do self maintenance - especially with zero days and issues that require updates to not be pwned the instant you connect to the www.
I think it's an entirely acceptable solution for non-technical users who don't know how or cannot be bothered to improve the scenario. Personally I would never run Asus/Netgear/Zyxel/etc's all-in-one router firmware on the network's edge. Probably not even on the inside of the network.
Well depending on how you roll, I've had 2 routers - inside/outside. Guest network, IoTs, etc on the outside. Computers, Phones, Printers on the inside. Don't currently - but I also don't have many IoTs currently. Will probably return to this at some point but moved and haven't went out of my way to set it up "fancy" like.
But realistically, it's definitely better for the "masses" to have stuff that just takes care of itself. Grandma don't know how to update router firmware and people like that are why stuff like Apple's "appliance" model is better than Androids more hands on approach.
Even some of us software developers get tired of managing all of these devices. I am not opposed to “appliances“, nor do I view it in someway diminishes my or anyone else’s elite status because we don’t want to manage and optimize eight computers for life.
I do prefer Android for streaming devices, there’s just too much value added from using Android there. But I use an iPhone because I just want my phone to work. And I limit my desktop computer count to exactly one. For networking, I use Asus Merlin. I don’t use it for its flexibility or features, just for the stability which this recent news confirmed was a good idea. The only special features I even use are an OpenVPN server, and secure DNS over TLS to cover my devices that don’t support DNS over HTTPS.
The convenience of having a device that can phone home and update itself is far more valuable than the risk that occasionally one of those updates might cause a problem.
Aside from the risk of breaking things, there's the risk of data leaks and enabling surveillance through negligence or intentional back doors.
Hardware and software companies have a story of implementing anti-user features in very shady ways (ie silent update to T&C allowing the org to track and share data with third parties and/or brokers).
I don't care if my smart Philips light bulb shares all its data with god knows who. My router? that's the device that manages all connections including critical ones. I want it to be impeccable and transparent.
That's why I refuse to buy from manufactures that require a could account like Eeroo or that require weird connections to work properly like Tenda (a friend had a Tenda mesh and it wouldn't work if we blocked connections to Baidu, Weibo and others)
We're definitely two different kinds of people. When it comes to network equipment I value control and security over that sort of convenience any day.
(add.: and I don't mean "different kinds of people" in a condescending way, but that we value different aspects and have different methods for going about these things)
> So, you want to manually download an update, install it and brick your device on your own schedule?
Yes, because I can plan for it. I can do it on a weekend or a local holiday. I can do it in the evening after work, or in the morning so that I have the whole day to go out and buy a replacement. If it's not critical, it can wait until my vacation.
And even without any risk of bricking, it should still be done on my schedule. I don't want the connection to glitch while I'm in the middle of a live stream, or an online multiplayer game, or a call with a distant relative.
I (home user) like to delay updates that aren't reported as 'critical security updates' in order to allow others to brick their devices, then I can decide if the risk is worth it. Yes, manual control.
Now you're just taking a silly defensive position by trivializing what I said using stupid rhetoric... I prefer to be in control over updates for network equipment, even the router in my home, reviewing changes and feedback, and to be "on the ready" in case the update does not work. I leave automatic updates for things like browsers.
It's actually not too bad in my case. All in all not that many minutes of pre-emptive effort even across a whole year. The hassle of a surprise Internet outage and having to find what/where the problem is would cost me more.
Yes. Bricking the network in the middle of a voip call, or meeting is unpleasant. Waking up to a broken network is also unpleasant, when I need to do my job, an instead have to go fixing some underdocummented mess of a gadget.
Let's assume the update is bad and (soft)bricks routers like yesterday's update.
Is it better to be part of the auto-update pool of users (who definitely got their routers bricked), or be a manual updater?
Normal case: You lose some features / quality of life / stability improvements for a day / week / month (whenever you get around to updating it).
Best case is that you aren't in general population of bricked routers like everyone else today.
Worst case scenario is that you're late to a zero-day exploit. Although, the tech news cycle tends to report those stories pretty well, so you'd be aware of it.
The pros definitely outweight the cons in my opinion, especially on something critical like my internet access.
Okay, but these asus routers have also silently successfully updated themselves hundreds of times.
So against the one time you win by manually updating, you are weighing hundreds of times you had to research before clicking ‘update’ to see if there were any reports of this update bricking routers?
Because if you don’t do that, you just click the update button whenever you get round to it, you are running your router in a ‘vulnerable to zero days’ configuration, AND you’re going to brick your router the one time they ship an update that goes bad.
I think automatic updates for a typical all-in-one home router is totally OK, and preferrable, for people who don't have the know-how to improve on it (because I'm not an opsec professional or hobbyist). It's unfortunate that these are also the people who face extended outage when something like this does go wrong. They can't fix it themselves, and the nephew that can might not be available for days.
> Even if it turns out (once this event has been fully understood) that the vendor-installed firmware "phoned home" to collect an update of sorts that led to this?
Asus, the company that makes routers with paid monthly subscriptions whose trial you cannot opt out of? Go out a buy one of their newer nightshade whatever routers and see what I’m talking about. You literally cannot stop that thing from nmap’ing your home network for the first month.
i agree with you, but after a decade of routers and openwrt i decided to go with ubiquiti. it got to a point where the router hardware just wasn’t good enough, no matter the software. so i got myself a dream machine, a pro switch with poe and an AP and i have never looked back.
Same here. The brand isn’t necessarily important, but rather the idea that the “router” and “access point” don’t need to be bundled in the same physical box. For most people, their incoming internet line comes into their house at an atrocious point for radio transmission and reception.
By separating the router from the Wi-Fi access point, even if you only use one AP, you’re able to put the AP in the best place for full coverage. I hired an electrician to run the cable for me when I bought a house about 10 years ago- he charged a reasonable price, cut a minimum number of holes in the wall, and I was left with a cable in the center ceiling of the house which gave me excellent service throughout with a ceiling mounted AP.
Since then I’ve added on to the house and run additional wires to more ceiling mounted APs to get consistent 5ghz only access throughout the house. Rock solid and never have to think about it (although it is always tempting to tweak)
I have d-link mesh satellites, and needed 4 around the house just so I didn't have any blindspots. To show how bad they are, when my laptop is within a metre of the d-link main satellite, I get the full 150Mbs of my upstream, but 2 metres away but with line of sight, it drops to ~130Mbs. Leave the room, and it's about 90Mbs :(
I was hoping something like Ubiquiti would be something like the full upstream speed without the horrible dropout-per-metre I'm getting right now. Happy to get a few of them in mesh (if that's how they work) if I can get full speed from my office which is curretly 4 hops away.
i do not recommend mesh. mesh networks halve your bandwidth. if you can just use an ethernet cable to the next access point. the good news is that all their APs use power-over-ethernet, so you just need an ethernet cable, no sockets.
as a reference, a single long range AP covered a 7 bedroom house (wood), with just a couple of minor blind spots. but for a double wall brick house we needed 3x U6 lite.
This is only true for single band networks. You can use one band as backhaul, another for AP, and still get ~300Mbps.
> of course, if you can't/won't use ethernet cables for your APs, you can try this mesh
All of the latest UniFi APs support meshing. Ubiquiti is not great at naming their products, apparently.
Also, I would advise against the LR. It does output more power and has a larger antenna than the lite, but there is little to it for indoors use, compared to the Pro, which I believe is cheaper and definitely is speedier.
I used to use PoE and was getting great speeds everywhere in the house, but then I got solar panels and an inverter. Turns out, that a lot of people ended up having the same issues as me on whirlpool.net.au :(
But yeah, I've also considered getting an electrician in and wiring some rooms with CAT-6 and go wireless AP in that room. But sounds like it's still going to be the same as mesh doing this and halving my speed?
Awesome! Thank you for the links. I'll check them out!
> But yeah, I've also considered getting an electrician in and wiring some rooms with CAT-6 and go wireless AP in that room. But sounds like it's still going to be the same as mesh doing this and halving my speed?
as long as there is an ethernet cable from your switch/router to the AP, then speed will not halve. speed halves only when using mesh.
> Awesome! Thank you for the links. I'll check them out!
no problem. i started out my career in networking, and have always kept a soft spot for it even thou i'm doing software these days.
the minimum you need is:
- 1x Dream Machine (Pro or SE doesn't matter)
- 1x Access Point (could be long range, could be lite, depends on your needs)
you plug in the internet and the AP into the Dream Machine and that's about it.
from this barebones setup you can add further hardware depending your needs. for example I've added a PoE switch and another smaller non-poe switch (that funnily enough is powered by the other PoE switch).
You might look at some of the replies in this thread. The poster you’re replying to has an outdated view of how mesh networks work with modern hardware.
Mesh networks can use Ethernet as backhaul and they can also use dedicated radios on 6GHz for backhaul. I’m using a mix of both (still have a couple I need to run Ethernet to) and it’s fantastic.
> Mesh networks can use Ethernet as backhaul and they can also use dedicated radios on 6GHz band for backhaul. I’m using a mix of both (still have a couple I need to run Ethernet to) and it’s fantastic.
I wouldn’t recommend wireless backhaul to people who have bad experience with WiFi. Some people have bad WiFi because their (older?) buildings have problems with wireless in general: I am not saying they live in a faraday cage but still their if their WiFi isn’t great, wireless backhaul won’t be either. Go wired if you have a choice.
For sure, that's why I mentioned that I'm still in the process of switching over to pure ethernet for backhaul.
That said, if you have enough nodes, 6GHz for backhaul works pretty nice right now. My home has concrete block exterior walls with some interior concrete and plaster walls and the nodes that use dedicated 6GHz for backhaul are doing just fine as is.
If you happen to have existing coax cable runs in your house, you might look into MOCA. It's used by some modern cable tv boxes and similar devices to route ethernet packets over the existing coax cable.
It can be used on the same coax as is used for your cable modem, though if you can isolate the coax you want to use as an ethernet link, you might have better results.
I've used the competing standard DECA in the past, as it was significantly cheaper than MOCA about 5-8yrs ago ($25/unit vs $150/unit) but MOCA is now the much better option with it supporting GB speeds and pricing being down around ~$50/unit. I think the max speeds I saw over DECA was about 100Mbps, maybe 200Mbps on shorter runs.
lol, sorry I got mixed up. Yeah, I meant to say that EoP seems to drop out and lose bandwidth on my lines. For devices rated at 300Mbps, I'm getting about 19Mbps
>i do not recommend mesh. mesh networks halve your bandwidth. if you can just use an ethernet cable to the next access point. the good news is that all their APs use power-over-ethernet, so you just need an ethernet cable, no sockets.
Mesh dropping bandwidth is less of an issue these days as we have much more bandwidth and you are unlikely to run the largest channel width anyway, then newer solutions support mu-mimo with separate backhaul.
Note that 802.11r is only useful if you’re using WPA enterprise authentication (certificates and radius and all). Most home networks use WPA personal pre shared keys (aka here’s my Wi-Fi password).
802.11r accelerates the multi step handshake that you have to perform with WPA enterprise when you roam from one access point to another. There is a much shorter handshake for WPA personal so there is no advantage to enabling 802.11r if you’re not using Enterprise auth.
Not entirely true: for WPA2 it is the case that all APs and clients use the same key, but even in that case, 11r adds mobility domain and FT-PSK and results in more devices having better roaming.
For WPA3-SAE and WPA3-OWE it is required as each client has a different (session) key.
If you live in the US and your house was built in the past 20 years or so, check if you have old school phone jacks around. Many contractors took a “short cut” and ran dedicated cat5 cable to each of those wall ports instead of daisy chaining cat3 (probably was cheaper to buy cat5 in bulk).
Take the face plate off your phone jack and if you see a wire with four pairs of wires inside, only two connected to the jack, you may be in luck. I had rented a few townhomes which were like that, enabling me to build out a simple wired network without modifying or drilling at all.
Can confirm, this was the exact situation in my 2004-built townhome. Everything came into my bedroom closet. Learned how to terminate Ethernet, stuck a switch in there, and had a great home net.
Yeah, I've already cut all the phone lines since there was a tonne of noise when I was with ADSL. I've now got fibre into a closet which is connected straight to a modem and switch... I'll be getting an electrician to CAT6 from the switch the the rest of the house and then AP from the terminals
Yeah, most of my devices these days are 5Ghz. I suspected either interference, or that shorter waves don't penetrate obstacles as well as longer waves, or it could be that my inner walls are made from lead.
"You are mostly programmers" is not quite the insult that you think it to be.
This programmer's task for the weekend is to buy a couple of cheap second-hand Ethernet switches, by the way, as part of an on-going effort to switch to networking infrastructure that doesn't compete with at least 13 of my neighbours. (-:
Yeah, I've tried tp-link, d-link, netgear (consumer), and they're all really bad. Each time I think I've found the silver bullet, but I keep hearing how good Ubiquity is. I know they're not defying physics, but I'm sure that as they aimed at commercial then I'll hopefully be getting something way better than what I'm getting now.
I think this plus laying cable should last me another 10-20 years
In my neck of the woods (France), Ubiquity is fairly expensive. I've had good results with a cheapish (~100 €) netgear "business" access point, the wax214.
It supports poe, wifi ax (but only on 5 GHz), wpa 3 and can broadcast 4 separate networks, each on its own vlan (but it doesn't do any routing). It's been great for random iot junk that I don't want on my main network.
Routing is handled by an old HP elitedesk I've saved from the bin at work.
I actually switched away from a UDM after finding out that I could only hit 500 Mbit/s uplink (out of ~930) due to a PPPoE performance bug as there's no hardware offloading and the old Cortex-A57 cores (in a SoC from a vendor now owned by Amazon, so extremely end-of-life) just couldn't handle that.
Now I'm running a Turris Omnia with the bundled OpenWRT fork for router tasks and that seems to work fine.
Not sure about parent but here in Brazil all ISPs are still using PPPoE even under gigabit fiber, it's a miracle they can find a router that is able to push 800 Mbit under single-threaded pppoe. I've yet to find a router capable of doing proper gigabit that isn't some enteprise machine that costs me a car.
In cases like yours, the best solution is probably to get an x86-based fanless mini PC built around a laptop CPU. Those can hit quite high single-threaded speeds and have enough resources to handle not just your routing but also light duty as a home server. Chinese brands like Qotom and Topton and a bunch of others are selling them on AliExpress. They're several hundred dollars, but still cheaper than a lot of enterprise gear, and you can get them with 5 or 6 Ethernet interfaces. Getting a separate consumer WiFi access point/router with minimal CPU power of its own is usually cheaper than trying to add an AP-capable WiFi card to a mini PC.
And if you're going to do that, just run opnsense and (being essentially a distro of full blown BSD) have all the security, flexibility and scalability the machine can provide.
Many fiber ISPs here in Europe seem to share the backend infrastructure between DSL and FTTH subscribers and that sadly also involves PPPoE encapsulation.
It’s pretty stable but frustrations remain. Their Edge series are more powerful but the UI is painful and much must be done via the CLI. The Unifi line doesn’t support such things. For example, on an edge router it was fairly easy to make a rule saying “any port 53 traffic that isn’t coming from the Pihole, redirect back to the Pihole”.
The Dream Machine Pro isn’t 100% stable and occasionally requires the config to be reloaded. It’s support for more modern VPN types has been slow to materialise.
The UDMP has been vastly superior to my crappy IDP supplier routers.
The Unifi APs run OpenWRT. The Edgerouters and USGs run EdgeOS which is a fork of Vyatta 6.3. The Dream Machines run UnifiOS. I'm somewhat out of the Unifi loop these days as I only use the APs since my Edgerouter died in 2020, so am not up on what Unifi OS is based upon.
I won't say they never ran OpenWRT, but I've used several generations of Unifi AP's and every one used unifiOS which is based on Vyatta. If they did run OpenWRT, they haven't in well over a decade.
I suggest sshing to one of your Unifi APs and verifying. My APs are running firmware version bz.6.5.28 released 3 months ago. It is based upon OpenWRT 17.01.6 according to the /etc/openwrt_release file on the AP.
Edited: Added newlines for file content. I originally posted this from mobile in a hurry. Copy/pasting from the ssh session on my phone resulted in newlines being lost.
Or, if you're in Germany, get a FRITZ!Box. It's been my favorite product purchase ever[1]. Solid performance, and the software is a bliss. Here are some niceties available out of the box:
- Traffic prioritization (real-time, prioritized, background), and access profiles (per-device data budget, filters, max online time).
- Per device statistics on max data rate, current throughput, Wi-Fi standard, encryption, signal properties (e.g. MU-MIMO or not), etc.
- Special LAN port for guests, without access to the rest of the network (good for that ad filled smart TV).
- Extra LED with customizable function (can light up if there's anybody in the guest network, or a device plugged in the USB, or data cap is exceeded, etc).
- Energy consumption graphs for each major component (CPU, Wi-Fi, USB devices, etc).
- More information about my DSL cable than I know what to do, including spectrum graphs, line attenuation, latency, and even approximate line length.
- Security diagnostics with provider info, firmware status, login credentials type, open ports, egress filters, Wi-Fi security, etc.
- Also has features for smarthome, telephony, NAS, and media center, but I've never tried those.
Yeah these are great pieces of software and hardware, and AVM is a decent company as well. Although I personally prefer to hang up a Ubiquiti WAP.
I wanted to say there used to be Freetz which was neat but they ensured this wouldn't work anymore. But I learned it is continued in form of Freetz-NG!
My ISP (Freedom Internet) allows me to rent a modem for 2 EUR per month. A steal.
I have a 7530-AX and on the whole it's been good - but for some reason the 5GHz service keeps switching off; wondered if you'd had any similar experience?
No, can't say I have. Does your SSID disappear for some time, or is the 5GHz setting turning off permanently?
I've read about routers disabling 5GHz when they detect RADAR, because 5GHz can interfere with that use, and RADAR has higher priority. Here's an article on this, official from the manufacturer and for your specific model (another point for them in my book):
Thanks! This might be the clue I need - looks like the channel I’m using might be more prone to RADAR interference. Trying out a few changes now to see what effect it has.
It could also be a client issue; I configured my access point to choose the best channel for 5GHz and sometimes when it picks a DFS channel, some devices just can't connect.
I would also recommend OpenWRT - to anyone who's tech-savvy enough to upload a new firmware file and go through a web interface to set up the network. I was used to setting up things like Mikrotik or OpenBSD+pf (which while great, are not exactly intuitive), and was surprised it's really no more difficult (often less difficult) than using whatever stock web UI these SoHo routers usually come with.
The kind of hardware offloading included in consumer router hardware is fundamentally broken by design. Relying on the ethernet switch to handle NAT instead of the CPU makes it impossible to do software-based QoS (eg. the SQM module's cake or fq-codel) or any other packet processing that said ethernet switch isn't equipped for.
The router I have right now is the best one I've ever had, it's an APU4D4 from teklager.se.[1]
> APU router is the most open-source network device you can buy. It comes with open-source BIOS, open-source operating system of your choice and open hardware schematics. It's not locked down in any way.
I bought mine with opnsense pre-installed and it has been absolutely rock solid. For wi-fi, I've just used an old router with wifi in "ap-mode" connected to my APU router -- interestingly it turns out that the throughput bandwidth for wi-fi increased by orders of magnitude as soon as the poor Asus box didn't have to perform any logic on the packets passing through.
I would recommend installing opnsense on any old desktop PCs you have lying around. Get an intel LAN card with two ports (or more) and you'll be golden.
OpenWRT is fine but I've found that if you're shopping around for devices it's hard to find ones that will do 1gbps with traffic shaping enabled for an affordable price.
ServeTheHome has been doing a series on fanless mini desktops that are perfect for the role of router (most don't have WiFi though, you'd need a separate AP).
Honestly, not such a bad thing. Routers are normally located far from the ideal location in most houses/apartments for good wireless coverage. Usually in the corner of the basement where the coax/fibre/phone lines come in, not exactly a good place to put an AP.
I've been running separate APs for awhile and IMO it's the way to go if you're at all interested in running anything like openwrt/opnsense.
Modern routing appliances are like a vcr/tv combo. You will have a better time if you split the functionality apart. It allows you to change/upgrade pieces of your network infrastructure more easily.
For sure - I casually looked at OpenWRT on x86 and it seemed (on the surface at least) to be more fiddly than opnsense. Updates and handling storage/partitions appeared to be more unclear to me. But that was probably just me, I didn't dig too deep into it.
1. Use the ext4 image and extend the main partition to the full size of the disk. This requires a lot of "fiddling" later in case of upgrade (as parent wrote).
2. Use the combined squashfs image and don't touch the image layout (no resizing, keep the ~100 MB free default / partition). Easy upgrade experience like other embedded devices (get image, open ui or ssh, upload, flash, reboot, done). Oddly, this isn't made clear by the official Wiki at all and the simplest option.
IMO, the best configuration is running your x86 box with Proxmox and run the squashfs OpenWrt in a VM. There is no need for more than 100 MB of space and if you need to install so many packages or apps, better create another VM and use a standard Linux distro. It will also be more standard for many apps to be installed on a full fledged OS instead of the custom OpenWrt layout.
You only need 2vcpu and 256 MB of ram to run standard OpenWrt at 1 Gbps (SQM included if you have a recent CPU). The rest of your box ressource can be used for anything you want.
I used to run OPNsense but I switched to Debian because of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34839161 . I wouldn't recommend OPNsense any more for anyone who cares about security.
When I went shopping for a router I had a lot of trouble finding one.
I basically don't care about "features," but I wanted the latest WIFI standards because of reception issues in my house, and at least 4 wired ethernet ports. (I don't want to have to buy dongles / extenders for wired ethernet ports.)
It was surprisingly hard to find an OpenWRT router that supports the latest WIFI features, so I just went with a proprietary router.
I recently picked up a Linksys e8450 (twin sibling of the Belkin RT3200) and flashed it with openWRT and it's been great; WIFI-6 speeds on a router that is actually configurable
Something I learned first-hand from empirical testing is that Intel cards are quantifiably better at receiving frames than cards with Realtek/Mediatek/Ralink chipsets, specifically in congested environments.
In the presence of a collision, the Intel cards are able to successfully receive the stronger signal of the two as long as there's enough of a difference in signal strength.
The cards with Realtek chipsets on the other hand, are only able to receive the stronger of the two frames if the stronger frame started being transmitted first.
It's as if Intel's receiver is always looking for frame preambles even when a valid preamble has been heard and the radio is in the middle of receiving a frame. The other receivers stop looking for preambles while in the middle of receiving a frame.
If you live in an urban environment and have wifi problems, you'll likely have an observable improvement if you upgrade.
I don't know how well Qualcomm and Broadcom chipsets perform, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least Qualcomm works as well as Intel.
I've been using a Mikrotik for about 2 years now, switched from an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X when I upgraded to 1gig at home. It works great and has been rock solid since setting it up. I even have 4 port bonding setup to my main switch because neither has SFP+.
However, it was kind of a bear to get all setup. In terms of setup difficulty it goes Mikrotik -> EdgeRouter - any consumer focused router. I've been putting off setting up VLANs for about a year and a half because I just know I'm going to break everything.
I really liked the Tomato firmware for these things a while back... Been using OpnSense currently, with a dedicated AP mounted centrally in my home. It's a shame that the FCC rules have pretty much guaranteed that routers will only allow signed firmware updates, though the companies could do it differently. In the end, I miss the plethora of home hardware that can be consumer maintained and upgraded. I've avoided most "smart home" stuff for that reason.
More of a Tomato fan myself (used multiple ASUS routers), but using a router with stock firmware always seemed not worth the risk when there are so many great alternatives.
