Comment by hakfoo
7 hours ago
I'm not using it for travel, but I got a GL-BE3600 recently and it's surprisingly decent as a home router for my very specific needs.
I wired the desktop PCs in the house, so the only Wi-Fi users are mobiles, a smart TV, and a laptop. Everything else is already hanging off 2.5G wired switches. Pretty light duty, and I just wanted something that would provide robust routing and placeholder Wi-Fi. This does exactly that, and since it's OpenWRT based, it's probably marginally less terrible than whatever TP-Link was offering in the same price range.
It does run annoyingly hot, but I should just buy a little USB desk fan and point it at the router :P
I've had very impressive success running upstream OpenWRT on TP-Link hardware: I have Archer C7 access points running with literally years of uptime.
That being said, for any new application, I suggest using at least an 802.11ax AP, because cheap 2.4GHz devices that support 802.11ax are becoming common and using an 802.11ac router means that your 2.4GHz devices will be stuck with 802.11n, which is quite a bit less efficient. Even if you don't need any appreciable speed, it's preferable to use a more efficient protocol that uses less airtime.
I have the same router as the OP article - it ran at 72C until I did [this](https://phasefactor.dev/2024/01/15/glinet-fan.html#choosing-...). Currently running at 60C!