this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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The included MT7976C wifi can theoretically saturate the 2.5 Gbps uplink on its own. The use case is overall throughput for a mixture of wired and wireless devices.
It doesn't make sense to me to future proof wifi but not wired for $5 more, but maybe it makes sense to people in rural places
Let's be realistic. How many devices support a mainline version of OpenWRT and have more than one 2.5 Gbe port?
This thing is primarily a wifi router and access point. The available Ethernet ports, which are limited to what the chipset supports, are going to be more than sufficient for the majority of users.
If your main concern is wired throughput to the Internet, you are not the target audience for OpenWrt. The literal point of the OpenWrt project was to be an open source firmware for the WRT54G wireless router. The project has of course grown since then, but that is still its primary intended use case.
You are much more likely to find what you need in pfSense/OPNsense/etc, and on more powerful hardware. I would be way more concerned with the fact that it only has 1 GB RAM.
But if you still want to take that stance, there is nothing stopping you from reconfiguring the 2.5 Gbe port as a VLAN trunk and hanging it off a managed switch. Put your uplink in one VLAN and your LAN in another. That is going to be more than sufficient to saturate the 1 Gbps fiber connection that most people have (or at least asymmetrically saturate the 2 Gbps connection that some people have).
Or if you don't like that, just do the routing on the switch. If your primary concern is wired throughput, you'll probably already be doing that anyway. Then just use this thing as an AP, in which case the one port is sufficient.
While that's great, it's not of much use to most people if they can't saturate their link from either wifi or ethernet at separate times. It leaves a lot of wasted capacity imo.