HiWiFi 3 = B50?

The result first: the gigabit port became a WAN port. As long as it works, that's good enough. The HiWiFi 1, 2, and 3 are all obsolete devices! Compared with budget models from Xiaomi, Newifi, and the like, the hardware is basically the same; none is really better or worse. They're all based on the same reference design.

An unbrickable bootloader is available for the 7620. After installing it, you can flash modified Padavan firmware and use it as a repeater; that's about it. (The 5 GHz signal is not great, though—not as strong as with the official firmware.) The HiWiFi 3 Pro and 4 use different flash memory, so there is no reliable unbrickable bootloader for them yet. I suggest waiting until a reliable one is available before buying, or you will be limited to the official firmware. The HiWiFi 3 is like most 7620A devices, with nothing particularly special about it except for a separate gigabit LAN port. Why was it designed that way? To connect a gigabit NAS over 5 GHz? If so, does that mean the 5 GHz switching core and the gigabit LAN port share a connection, while the other two 100 Mbps ports—one WAN and one LAN—use a separate 100 Mbps core? Now it gets interesting: what is the switching speed between the 100 Mbps LAN port and the gigabit LAN port? Surely it is 100 Mbps. If that assumption is correct, using the gigabit LAN port for the WAN connection and connecting over 5 GHz should let 5 GHz speeds exceed 100 Mbps. One day, while browsing the official business devices, I found a device called B50: http://www.hiwifi.com/b50-view. Its specifications were exactly the same as the HiWiFi 3's. So I found the B50 firmware among the official ROMs: http://www.hiwifi.com/rom. A normal upgrade reported the wrong model. So I flashed it through the unbrickable bootloader, and it worked! It could still connect to the platform, and the plugins worked normally. The gigabit LAN port became the WAN port. My home broadband is only 10 Mbps, so I can't say for sure whether that theory holds up. Question: What is different about the B50 firmware? Answer: Only the port used for the WAN connection changes; everything else is the same. Someone in the group said that after flashing B50 firmware, the displayed system version was still HC5861. I cannot really explain that either. In any case, the gigabit port became the WAN port, and it works—that is enough.