ggggggggggw

People rarely recommend routers by their model number, if they recommend a router, they recommend the brand.

It's very hard for marketing guys to call Costco and say "hey, you remember that router we tried to sell you 6 months ago? well we just gave it a firmware update!", and close the sale

it's very easy for marketing to call Costco and say "hey we got this fantastic new router you guys might be interested in stocking", and close the sale

The problem with Omnia is that it's a niche product that is very unlikely to ever sell outside of its niche.

Also, it's being made by people who haven't made a router before. 99% of the issues you'll ever have with your wifi router are driver issues. Omnia is using OpenWRT for their base, however they'll still have to make the chipset driver work with OpenWRT, and at a reasonable speed.

Even if they get the driver working, it's unlikely that the device will be running at speeds comparable to other market competitors. It takes lots of unpleasant driver hacks, custom networking stacks, and prioritization magic to hit the benchmark numbers that Asus, Netgear, and Linksys push out.

I'm not saying you should write off the Omnia completely, I just recommend sitting back and waiting for it to be released/benchmarked before purchasing it.

> And these days so many people get it through their cable provider (or DSL, whatever) who have a marked interest in not generating support calls means you may get decent equipment.

You would think that, unfortunately it isn't true. Usually those ISP provided combination routers are completely outsourced - as in their hardware and firmware are both made by a chinese OEM overseas.

Believe me when I say there is nothing worse than the firmware on those chinese routers. They'll grab a bunch of open source software, reskin it, plug the chipset's reference driver into the OSS, then do a basic sanity test and ship it. You get what you pay for, and the ISPs want to pay as little as humanly possible.

I don't know what they do about the support. I remember one time we brought in an ISP's combination modem/router for performance tests against our device lineup, and it would crash if you ever tried to pull more than 40mbit/s through its ethernet ports.

i actually edited my post to include the thing about openwrt/ddwrt.

If you need stability, go with a high end consumer router and load OpenWRT/DDWRT on it. OpenWRT and friends are very stable, but don't often take advantage of advanced features like automatic channel selection, traffic prioritization, or beamforming.

If you absolutely need features, go with a ubiquiti AP. My only issue with them is their hardware leaves a lot to be desired, and is rarely powerful enough to cover a full home, this isn't necessarily ubiquiti's fault though.

Business class APs expect you to set up multiple APs in the office, so their hardware is typically a lot less powerful than what you'd see in a consumer wireless router. A ubiquiti AP will gladly cover your 1 bedroom apartment, but don't expect it to cover your 3 bedroom home

For those who are curious, there's a bunch of reasons that contribute to why consumer wifi routers sucks ass:

1. Wifi routers are very complicated. You need smart people at all levels of the stack to build a modern wifi router. You need people who know 802.1ac like the back side of their hand, people who know how to set up and deploy linux environments, embedded engineers for debugging OEM driver issues, networking gurus for handling the voodoo in levels 2-4 of the OSI stack, application people for rolling the user interface, cloud people for cloud support. Normally this isn't a big deal, if it wasnt for the next point

2. The profit margins on consumer routers are complete trash. Even if you're one of the big boys with double digit market share, you're going to have a very hard time keeping a decent engineering team staffed and your marketing team staffed at the same time while still breaking even.

3. Consumer router sales are SKU driven. There are dozens of price and performance points you have to hit to meet the demands of the consumer market. You cannot make be profitable with less than 10 actively selling SKUs. Every time you release a new SKU, it's a new opportunity for marketing to try to sell the device to brick and mortar stores that they're trying to expand into. If you aren't releasing 5-6 SKUs each year, you're going to have a very hard time keeping your router on store shelves.

4. Since sales are SKU driven and your engineering team is probably under funded, you have the exciting problem of maintenance releases. If your company has 50 supported SKUs and you find a non-driver issue in one of them, the chances are that it affects 10 other SKUs as well, if not all of your other SKUs. Pushing that maintenance firmware to 50 SKUs could easily take 6 months of combined QA or Firmware development time. As far as your marketing department is concerned, all that time you spend on maintenance releases is time that isn't spent on making new SKUs with exciting new features.

tldr: get a business class wifi router