My favorites are TP-Link's WDR3600/4300, AC1200 and AC1750. Yeah, not switches per se, but $20-40, Gigabit Ethernet, dual band Wifi, very stable and fast with OpenWRT, can do anything. You can daisy chain a few of them if you need more ports, it's rather fun.

Or instead of being a penny pincher get an AX wireless router and not contribute more ewaste.

If you really are futureproofing, note that most AX (Wifi 6) equipment today doesn't support the new 6ghz frequencies recently allocated to wifi. For that you need "Wifi 6E". Of course, 6E stuff is quite expensive right now. (Expect to pay $400+ per node)

Heh, I only have 4 of them and they're not going out of use anytime soon. Bought all of them used, of course.

One works as a main router for a fiber Internet connection (via a dumb SFP-Ethernet D-Link switch), 2 handle the "Intranet" 1 house + 1 workshop (Wifi bridge via one band) computers, printer and NAS, and one is with me, acting as a repeater bridge.

If I buy anything new it'll habe to support OpenWrt or I stick with AC1750s lol.

Even Wifi N 300 is enough for my needs, computers are wired and my phone doesn't need AC speeds.

Which would you recommend?

The EAP660 is pretty good. I replaced a few mesh routers with a single EAP660 on a second floor ceiling. I like that they allow you to run a single one without a controller. I'm happy to no longer tie my router to my access point as it was getting to be a bit too much effort to make changes or upgrade before I split their roles. No WRT support, but I don't think that's a concern for just an access point.

The AX series is the current TP-Link offering for most use cases starting at ~$80: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=50012120%20100158096%206013568... In addition, the AX3200 Belkin (RT3200) is $100, and the $140 Linksys (E8450) are both listed as supporting OpenWRT.

It seems like at least the TP-Link AX50 won't have openwrt support anytime soon (or more likely at all), so even worse for long usage times.

Well it's cheap'ish for a managed gigabit switch...and "managed" is where you begin to add $$$, even in cheapo world.

Also current price on ebay for a refurb N1108T-ON unit is 360 quid, so I reckon relatively speaking you could say it's cheap.

Yeah, I found the same thing on the prices - but interestingly looking at completed sales, prices are more like ~£100. I'm assuming something has recently changed to make people mark them up more, and no-one's biting yet.

It's an amazingly cheap 10g switch. (It has 4x10g along with the 1g ports).

It's even a very cheap fully managed switch.

It has zero 10g ports:

  N1108T-ON: 
  1GbE Port Attributes Multi-speed:
  8x 10/100/1000Mbps half/full duplex RJ45 ports
  1GbE Port Attributes Single-speed:
  2x 1000Mbps half/full duplex RJ45 ports
  Integrated 1GbE SFP dedicated ports: 2
  Integrated 10GbE SFP+ dedicated ports: N/A

My mistake. OK, it's just a reasonably cheap fully managed switch (at 85 pounds, anyway).

Easy mistake tbh - the larger switches in the range (i.e. 24 & 48 port models) do have 4 x 10Gb ports, and aren't much more pricey.

it's cheap compared to the £3,000 one normally pays for datacenter switches.

£3k for just a managed access switch seems a bit high, you should be able to get a 48 port 1G juniper ex3400 with 4x10 uplinks for about £1500 (of course proper switch prices are always hidden in layers of mystery, which really pisses me off. Fortigate nearly lost a sale when they couldn't even give us a ballpark figure upfront)

> it's more like low-end datacentre hardware

yep covered that