youyeetoo Banana Pi OpenWrt One - WiFi 6 Official OpenWrt Router Mainline Support, MediaTek MT7981B SoC 1GB DDR4 RAM, RJ45 Port

This is an amazing open-source little device! Excellent router. The OpenWRT software on it is a bit difficult to understand though (not a fault of this product, as the software is open source), but it works VERY well. If you're a novice network person, this may not be for you, although simple setups are probably easy to setup. The PoE port works perfectly with my TPLink switch, although the PoE port is designated as the WAN port (but you can swap this), which is probably not very useful, since it would likely connect to a cable-modem or other upstream bridge that doesn't provide PoE power. The USB front ports are also a bit confusing, as the USB-A port is for firmware updates. and the C port is for other things. Overall the speed is great, the build quality is excellent!

The best enterprise grade wifi router that you can ever get, beats all the rest: I can't list all the amazing things here, go check out reviews on youtube but they are: unlimited and forever updates, opensource, a full linux running on it, possibility to install any software or server on it (uses package management system), no limits of what it can do, lots of RAM, lots of storage, expandable with additional storage, A/B partition scheme (so you can't brick this one, as you can always fall back to partition A if you update the firmware in partition B and it breaks), very powerful CPU (dualcore 1.4 ghz), OpenWRT preinstalled: Offers THE SAME IDENTICAL INTERFACE NO MATTER WHICH ROUTER YOU HAVE IT INSTALLED ON (that is totally unheard of with the idiotic wifi routers from big companies, where each any every device must have a completely redesigned GUI, which is insanely annoying) They absolutely only thing that is bad: Only 2 Ethernet ports (instead of the 6 that normal routers have), so you need an additional switch. I don't understand the reason for this, as Ethernet ports cost almost nothing. But for the little over 100 dollars cost you get a extremely capable wifi router that has enterprise grade functionality that would would pay thousands for if you bought it elsewhere. Thanks to Linux as an OS, it never crashes and will keep running basically forever.

Great router for those that are tech savvy and like to control their router setups.

Cool product, didn't know it existed until recently. Love supporting Raspberry Pi and open source software. You can do a lot with this device and OpenWRT. I watched a few tutorials of setting up Banana Pi, and in some of them users were switching around pins, flashing Nand stuff, etc. Fortunately this comes with all that done and OpenWRT working out of the box. Most new routers enable a non-password protected WiFi signal to set things up. This didn't, but I guess that is expected. I had to use an Ethernet cable for setup. So make sure you can do that. Customizing/tweaking OpenWRT for complicated network setups is another story. It's definitely not plug and play, so don't expect that. For tech hobbyists and IT professionals, it's great. Tip: once you get a working setup, you can download your configs, and attempt to tweak more. If you get lost/break connectivity, just reload the configs that worked and keep tinkering. This really boosted the signal and speed and works well for what I wanted to accomplish in the network setup ideal for the environment I'm in. I'd say this works like a $200 - $250 Wifi router. This costs less but you will need to invest the time to get things running the way you want.

If you set up your own network or are interested in learning, I don't see how you can do better that this. If you are not exclusively wireless, you will likely need an ethernet switch in addition but I think that it is better to have a separate device for that anyway. I especially like the serial USB terminal connection. It makes working with the system so much easier. For some reason it even gives me a few extra frames per second from a wireless web camera compared to the cable company box. So it is fast as well. It came with a recent version of openwrt but a new version was released since then so I updated it. The update was easy and a lot less tense than usual since i had absolutely no worries about bricking and Knew the new version was compatible. Finally, If you want to work with software or hardware network development, I don't have to tell you this is THE router to get.