This $89 Wi-Fi router is designed to let you run whatever firmware you want

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) announced last week that the OpenWrt One, a Wi-Fi router created with open-source software in mind, is now available to buy for $89 on AliExpress. The SFC says the router “will never be locked down” and gives its owners the “right to change, modify, and repair” as they like.

The OpenWrt One is aimed at giving owners a “hacker-friendly device” that doesn’t rely on private companies’ update schedules and won’t lose support over time. That the OpenWrt One uses open-source software — it comes with OpenWRT pre-installed — means, in theory, you can keep it up-to-date for as long as you care to use it.

The SFC collaborated with single-board computer maker Banana Pi — which released its own OpenWRT router called the BPI-WIFI6 earlier this year — to manufacture the OpenWrt One. The router also comes as a standalone logic board for $68.42, although as Tom’s Hardware notes, that doesn’t appear to be available in the US just yet. The router has a switch that lets you separately flash the NOR and NAND parts of its flash memory — which makes it “almost unbrickable,” according to its AliExpress listing. The board also features an M.2 expansion slot.

Otherwise, the OpenWrt One is a simple, dual-band affair that uses the Wi-Fi 6 standard on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. It can be powered through either a USB-C port on the back or the 2.5GbE ethernet port next to it, using power over ethernet. It also has a gigabit ethernet LAN port, and it sports both a USB-A and USB-C port on the front.

Compared to Banana Pi’s cheaper $30 router, this model has twice the RAM at 1GB, and although it only has two ethernet ports compared with the BPI-WIFI6’s four, it has PoE support through its 2.5GbE port, where the BPI-WIFI6 router is all standard gigabit. The new router also has 3 x 3 MIMO support on the 5GHz band, so should supply more data throughput to more devices. It’s still not a wireless networking powerhouse — but with the lack of flexibility many mass-market alternatives offer, being purpose-built for open-source software is worth celebrating.