Hi all, I’m looking to upgrade my router from the default one that came from my ISP.
I don’t need anything super fancy, just something with 4+ lan ports (1gbps is ok, 2.5gbps would be nicer), 1 WAN Port, Wifi-6 (802.11ax), and the ability to have an isolated IoT network (using a vlan for this would be nice).
Any suggestions? I’d like to keep the price down if possible. This is just for my home network.
GL-Inet AX1800
OpenWRT, accessible via the advanced (LUCI) interface. You can define a bunch of SSID’s including guest networks and/or bind them to VLAN’s
All of the suggestions here are strong.
I don’t know what electricity costs in your region, but I consider that as part of my decisions. You can soon spend more on power than the device costs.
A router will be on 24/7 with a fairly consistent load (sure there’s peaks, more in the day, etc…)
Personally, I’d recommend you try a few different options - an old x86 PC is terrible for power, but great to try out pfSense / OPNSense / DD-Wrt / OpenWrt / Tomato first… then from that pick your real hardware.
Personally, I’ve tried a few things over the years and the *WRTs in a single re-imaged old wifi-router is probably everyone’s Step 1.
If you want new, low power, etc - have a look at this for inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM6Ivy_KLR4
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=bM6Ivy_KLR4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Check out Firewalla Gold. I think it would meet all of your requirements.
I use an Asus 86RU running Asus-Merlin. It ticks all of your boxes.
Could always whitebox it with Debian, nftables, dnsmasq, hostapd, etc. on an old mini PC if it has two NICs…
I’d replace Debian with openbsd. That’s my go to solution for labs at work.
At home I use a ubiquity thingy (the round box) as I used ubiquity at my previous work. It’s utter shit and the UI goes dead a few days after each hard reset. But it works and I use Tailscale for connecting to stuff at home, so no need to replace it yet
