Wi-Fi router recommendations
Contents
We're often asked which Wi-Fi router we recommend. While it largely depends on your personal needs, we do have some general recommendations below.
Quick Answer
Currently, our preferred router is the Linksys WRT-3200ACM.
Linksys sells this router as Open Source Ready. This means they promise not make any unexpected hardware revisions that break VPN-friendly firmwares such as OpenWRT.
Beyond that very important promise, this router also packs 3 Wi-Fi radio's, a powerful processor and AES acceleration. (More on that below.)
Longer Answer
CPU Selection
When looking at the CPU specification of a router, note the following:
- Most VPN protocols, including OpenVPN and v2Ray, can use only 1 CPU core. For these VPN protocols you'll want the CPU speed to be as high as possible (1.5Ghz or more), while the number of CPU cores is less important.
- Some more modern VPN protocols, like Wireguard, are able to utilize multiple CPU cores. For Wireguard we would recommend a router with 2 or more cores (at 1.0Ghz or more).
Hardware Acceleration
Ideally, you get a router with hardware acceleration for AES, like the Linksys router we recommend. When used with a VPN protocol that supports such an accelerator, like Wireguard, performance will be significanly higher than without an accelerator. Easily 10 to a 100 times faster.
The OpenWRT project has a table with encryption benchmarks for many Wi-Fi routers. When viewing this table you'll want to look for a router that has a very high score in the AES-128 column.
You'll notice our Linksys recommendation scores 53,226,420, while the popular Xiaomi MiWiFi scores only 8,088,570. The Linksys is more expensive, but the VPN performance difference is enormous.