I’m gonna be moving into a new place soon and I’ll be setting up the Internet there. I want to experiment with setting up a local network with static IPs just for learning and fun, so I want my own router. I don’t want something hard to use because other people will be using the internet from it too. I don’t really know what the router market looks like, and I don’t want to support Reddit, so I’m asking here.
Ideally, this router would:
- Be under $150 (but I might be willing to go a bit higher)
- Be easily purchasable (no AliExpress specials)
- Not sell data to corporations
- Have a long life, ideally through easily set-up open source firmware but reputable proprietary is fine
- Have good enough antennas to propagate signal across a small house
- Support up to 500Mb/s sustained speeds
What do you think? Thank you for your help!
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I know this isn’t gonna be super popular with the lemmy crowd, but if you’re looking for something really robust, customizable, but also pretty easy to use, Ubiquiti has been great. The cloud gateway max specifically. I think it’s $200 with no storage, but they have other slightly stripped down models for less. But you also need an access point. That’s kinda the benefit though is you can upgrade the access point independently of the router.
They also have the dream machine if you want a more traditional all in one router + wifi solution.
+1 for Ubiquiti, but I’d suggest one of the cheaper models with built in WiFi unless you plan on having an intricate network.
Or if your internet enters the house in a dead zone.
I have a brick house and our internet comes inside literally in one far corner with the most walls around it, so if the access point in there. Half of our house gets no internet.
I went for a cloud gateway ultra and then one access point centrally in the house where everything can reach.
I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, as they are great products out of the box.
A bit pricy, but worth it. I’d give the same recommendation as you for anyone wanting to dabble a little and have room to grow and play with VLAN’s, ACL’s and expandability in the future.
OpenWRT One router : https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one
So far I’m satisfied with our GL.INET Flint 2 (GL-MT6000). The price is within your range, and you can buy it directly from the manufacturer. It comes with OpenWRT and they’ve made it pretty easy to e.g. run your own wireguard VPN and AdGuard Home (like PiHole) for all your connected devices. The coverage is decent, and upgrading gave me WiFi in the second bathroom where the old router (10+ years old) could never reach. According to their own specs it has Wi-Fi speeds of 1148Mbps (2.4GHz) and 4804Mbps (5GHz), though I haven’t made my own measurings to verify those, and VPN speeds are lower at 190Mbps wired for OpenVPN and 900Mbps wired for Wireguard. At least this router has been very stable for the half year we’ve had it, and I haven’t experienced any bottlenecks from our modest usage.
I’m looking for a new router and some APs as well, and this one seems to offer what I want at a somewhat decent price point…but good lord that thing is seriously ugly, everything about it is just terrible.
Edit: oh it doesn’t do POE, then it’s not interesting as an AP
I bought a Flint 2 GL-MT6000 and I’ve been pretty happy with the choice.
- its currently on sale for $125
- it comes with a custom version of open-wrt, but it can be flashed to a different firmware
- easily purchaseable through their site
- I have not had signal issues in my place, but YMMV
- sustained speeds are at least 500Mb/s
- supports features like VLAN, which is part of why I bought it
Side note: Flint 3 just came out, but I’m not familiar enough with it to recommend.
Not sure about the availability in your region, however I have good experiences with AVM Fritz!Box routers. They are proprietary but extremely easy and reliable without sacrifycing security or features. They’re from a german company and basically the go-to router vendor here by both ISPs and in retail.
Same. I got a FRITZ!Box and it can do 90% of things I need. You can’t set VLANs to my knowledge. Worth knowing.
Yeah. It basically can only do guest and non guest, sadly. There used to be a hack allowing proper VLANs,but that’s long gone.
Look into MikroTik
OpenWRT One
They have their own router.
Why no one mentioned this yet, I have no idea.
Glinet
Check routers at a pawn shops and see which ones can run openwrt.
I have a 10GbE switch and haven’t hit 500Mb/s. Network capacity likely won’t be your bottleneck.
edit: ok, we’re probably both making the same mistake here, 500Mb/s isn’t even saturating a gigabit nic, you likely mean 500MB/s
No, I mean 500Mb/s, as my Internet will be 300Mb/s. My needs are not great.
I generally overshoot when it comes to the hardware specs, if I can. That way you’re prepared in advance if you end up having the option to upgrade your Internet connection.
Otherwise, you may find yourself locked in to the slower plan due to the cost of upgrading your hardware.
But, sometimes you have to choose realistic over optimal, of course. So in other words, I do not think I know what’s best for you! Just offering a perspective that has worked for me, in case it helps you in some way as you evaluate the choice that’s best for you.
Almost all routers can handle gigabit, which is almost certainly what you want if you plan on doing local networking. A typical hard drive has speeds of about a gigabit. There is no reason to get anything slower. You can also get some gigabit switches (or even faster if you are using nvme on both machines) and connect two machines that need fast speeds between them to it. Most switches will be able to send packets to each other without going through the router.
If you really want to do some learning you could try to set up an opnsense box on an old PC and connect that to a switch. It’s feature rich and completely modular and upgradable. This is probably the best thing you could do if you want to learn something but also the worst thing to do if you want consistent uptime since you can pretty easily break stuff if you don’t read the docs.
That said, as others have mentioned openwrt on a used router is probably the best of both worlds - feature rich but less breakable.
didn’t know you could still get a dial up plan.
j/k, but damn I’m so sorry, it should be illegal to call VDSL broadband.
Some of us live with cellular “broadband” and are thrilled to get 60Mbps. And no, there is no other option available at my location (not counting 12Mbps DSL).
I’m sure they would have mentioned if they needed a cellular router
Did you know openwrt makes their own router now. It’s called the openwrt one. They’re not had for the price, mines been pretty solid. And they have a bunch upgrade options.
I’ve been very happy with the Glinet Flint2. I think it checks most (if not all) your boxes.
Let me go out on a limb and rec a cheap mini computer with 2 mini gigabit (or more) ethernets, and either pfsense or opnsense. Those two run on anything that has an x86_64 cpu and easily update. Not any harder to learn to setup than mikrotik, and has lots more capability.
Any old hardware and run opnsense or pfsense (the former preferred)
If you want a wealth of information on what makes a good router/WAP, read https://www.wiisfi.com/. Or skip to the Recommendations section for hardware picks. I do recommend cross referencing for an OpenWRT compatible router
As others have said, get something that works with OpenWRT. It’s unbelievably flexible and the OpenWRT forum can be really helpful, both for finding ways to implement things and for solving problems.
Build your own using a mini PC that is capable of having multiple ethernet adapters , or any old laptop or PC that has multiple ethernet ports or multiple wifi modems, and install OPNsense or pfSense as the primary OS and essentially own your own network.
