Broadcom wireless

People often wonder why DD-WRT supports stuff that OpenWrt doesn't. It is often as easy as that: access to drivers.

• Broadcom has not released any FOSS drivers. Broadcom doesn’t support open-source much at all.
• DD-WRT has a license agreement and NDA in place with Broadcom that allow usage of better, proprietary, closed source wireless drivers (binary blobs) which they are not allowed to redistribute freely.
• OpenWrt use only FOSS drivers. Fully open-source support for Broadcom wifi chips is very limited.

Now what does limited support mean? What is working with open-source drivers and what not?

Limited means: 2.4GHz only b/g available, and 5GHz doesn't work at all. There might be some exceptions, but the general rule is as written before. For details see Unsupported features

With that in mind (no or only limited open source support of Broadcom devices), it's up to you whether to buy Broadcom devices or not.

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