Best routers out there ?

[Halcyon]

Even in congested RF environments, Wi-Fi can still be a very effective option, but you need decent gear to do it. Think Ubiquiti, Cisco, Aruba, that kind of thing. They are far more configurable and will out-perform the consumer crap in less than ideal situations, even on the 2.4 GHz band.

[sokoloff]

Wireless is sucking through a straw ( 54mbit/s) in a congested airspace with 20 other neighbours also fighting for a time slot on the 11 available channels. Wifi is fundamentally broken.

I get that you want wired.

I'll just note that modern 802.11ac wifi is significantly faster than what you cite there. Theoretical max is over a gigabit. I've never seen that, but I can speed test to approx the rating of my WAN connection. I pay for 200/10 Mbps (I think) and a wifi speed test out to Comcast's servers just now on my iPhone was 190.5/12.6 Mbps on 802.11ac.

That's phone wifi to a Unifi AC Pro AP then Cat 6 to a Unifi SW8-PoE then Cat 6 to a Unifi EdgeRouter X SFP then Cat 6 to an Arris 6190 cable modem to Xfinity/Comcast. (It's possible there's another SW8 between the SW8 upstairs and the Edgerouter-X. If you really care, I'll go look.)

[free_electron]

Wireless is sucking through a straw ( 54mbit/s) in a congested airspace with 20 other neighbours also fighting for a time slot on the 11 available channels. Wifi is fundamentally broken.

I get that you want wired.

I'll just note that modern 802.11ac wifi is significantly faster than what you cite there. Theoretical max is over a gigabit. I've never seen that, but I can speed test to approx the rating of my WAN connection. I pay for 200/10 Mbps (I think) and a wifi speed test out to Comcast's servers just now on my iPhone was 190.5/12.6 Mbps on 802.11ac.

That's phone wifi to a Unifi AC Pro AP then Cat 6 to a Unifi SW8-PoE then Cat 6 to a Unifi EdgeRouter X SFP then Cat 6 to an Arris 6190 cable modem to Xfinity/Comcast. (It's possible there's another SW8 between the SW8 upstairs and the Edgerouter-X. If you really care, I'll go look.)

Very nice but again all irrelevant for me as this is not what i am after.

3 computers , 2 nas devices , 1 internet connection. all hardwired
That's where i need my throughput. i do not store data locally on computers. files are all on nas boxes.
TV's and media players are all hardwired too. they get their stuff either from internet or nas

Wifi is only for surf the internet , read newspapers etc. i don't care if that is slow ( i do care to have connection ) other wifi is for echo ( alexa) and that's it. all low bandwidth. my Wifi is basically is an independent network from my wired network with no bridge between them.

This is not what i am looking for.
My original question was : what are the best ( as in fastest throughput ) routers out there.
i learnt a couple of new brands and some of the pointers given put me on the right track as it altered my perception of certain things and made me rethink topology.

the solution for me now is to
- switch my existing wiring to 10G ( i have Cat6 in the walls and nothing is longer than 25 meters ) by buying 1 SPF+ to 10GbaseT adapter and an 8 port switch with 10GBaseT
- keep my existing master switch which has 2 SPF+ ports, ditch all the intermediate switches
- Buy a router with SPF+ port and connect that using a SPF+ cable to my existing switch

the on-board router Ethernet ports become essentiall an 'extension' of my main switch. The link is 10GB and there are 6 ports so i can not fill the 10G link with the data from the 1G ports. Even including the wireless and wan traffic i can not fill the 10G pipe.
The office ports are the same way. 3 computers 3 printers not capable to fill the 10G pipe. 8 ports at 1Gbit into a 10G pipe. only 6 are used.

so my entire network basically changes to a fabric where every port becomes 1gbit capable without bottlecks. None of the 10G pipes can ever be fully loaded as there are not enough devices hanging off them to fill them (max 8 devices per 10G pipe)
That is a big step up from having to share 1G links for 6 to 8 devices with multiple hops between them.

As for my wifi : the new router has MU MIMO and beamforming , three band and there will be an extender also three band. the extender will use a hardwire as i don't want to sacrifice a wireless channel to link the extender. there's already too many devices in the air fighting for space.

my current wifi router has none of that. it is a simple AC1200.

in future i can upgrade my master switch to a 24port 1Gb + 4 port SPF+
then i can send 10G pipe to downstairs and to garage as well.

[tautech]

wifi speed is NOT the issue. (coverage is)

Then maybe a better range modem is required.

i am talking WIRED as in hard ethernet cables.

Understood from the OP.

Still, if you are having WiFi issues either a better router or access points will fix this.

I have ~30m CAT5 run to this PC from a switch and then ~10m CAT6 to our router and when adding another switch locally for test equipment connectivity this PC speed tests improved.
Not that I know for sure but I suspect switches have better cable driving ability than PC NICs.

In my case a cheap solution was additional switches gave me both more local options and better performance.

[Black Phoenix]

Understood from the OP.

Still, if you are having WiFi issues either a better router or access points will fix this.

I have ~30m CAT5 run to this PC from a switch and then ~10m CAT6 to our router and when adding another switch locally for test equipment connectivity this PC speed tests improved.
Not that I know for sure but I suspect switches have better cable driving ability than PC NICs.

In my case a cheap solution was additional switches gave me both more local options and better performance.

In a project I develop, were throughput was something users wanted, this was the solution: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Mikrotik-Cloud-Smart-Switch-CSS326-24G-2S-RM-24-x-Gbit-LAN-2x-10Gbit-SFP-Cage/323813144298?epid=3016758178&hash=item4b64c476ea:g:cZQAAOSwLNxcDRey

24Gbit plus 2 10Gbit for connection with the server room with 10Gbit connection. It was a company that relied heavily in work from CAD Files saved in a Server Cluster.

[Berni]

I have dealt with Netgear, Asus, D-Link etc.. and they are just consumer grade toys. But its MiktoTik that has been rock solid reliable for me.

Okay yes they did have a security hole in RouterOS but don't think Cisco gear that costs over a grand doesn't have those. Even Ciscos VoIP phones had vulnerabilities that could be used to traverse a network or spy on people using the microphone.

So far MikroTik routers are the only ones that i found could route full 1Gbit throughput of realistic WAN traffic for something that costs under 100 bucks. It never needed a reboot in the many years of working and can be configured for nearly anything (Tho the configuration settings are pretty overwhelming to figure out unless you are a network admin). You can also easily get these routers with SFP ports to do fiber or 10Gbit Ethernet.

WiFi i haven't stress tested with >20 devices or something, but for home use WiFi never skipped a beat and provided plenty of range (I have a 1000mW TX power model), and if more range is needed multiple of these routers can configure themselves into a WiFi mesh network and intelligently route traffic along the best path while also doing proper seamless handover like the Ubiquity solutions (No lost packets or even a jump in ping time during handover).

[NivagSwerdna]

MikroTik combined with TP-link Deco mesh. Best solution I have had so far.
... And a sprinkle of power line which I am less happy about.

[Rerouter]

For my physical Internet I'm using an the one tautech recommended (archer9), soley because very few routers seem to come with a gigabit WAN port. have that hooked up to an 8 port Gigabit switch and that covers my house,

So far it as not been the limit for anything I have tried to accomplish, It happily routed 2 ports to 2 ports at full bandwidth when I was backing up my NAS,
still if you want real speed, you just plug that into a 10gig switch, let the internet be the only limited link at 1 gig, and keep the rest of the network as fast as you need it, with 3 slow ports on the average router, and 10 gig where ever else you need it.

[madires]

new router. here is the idea
port 1 - nas1
port 2 - nas2
port 3 - 24 port switch housefeed
port 4 - 8 portswitch - legacy devices ( old nas , home auto hubs and timecapsule ) old nas will be gone by end of year
port 5 - ipcams
port 6 - garage
port 7+8 link aggregation to office

Do you need the 8Gbps routed (network segmentation) or switched (one large LAN) ?

[Berni]

Handling 1Gbit of traffic between two LAN ports on a router or switch is a lot easier to do.

This local traffic gets routed according to the MAC address inside packets, this lets the switch just simply have a lookup table of what MAC address is accessible on what port. So there are a lot of chips that implement this Ethernet switch functionality in hardware. Because of this even the cheap crappy gigabit switches are actually capable of keeping with with a full 1Gbit of traffic between two ports. You can still get them on there knees by sending that full 1Gbit trough all ports simultaneously and this is where the big expensive professional switches are better at.

But when it comes to actually routing IP traffic out to the internet that is a much harder job. When a client inside the LAN wants to request a webpage it has to send a TCP connection request trough the router where that request is written down and when a response to the request comes back the router has to go back and look trough who made the request so that it can pass on the response to the right client inside the LAN. This makes for a lot more work as now the router has to actually look at the contents of the packet. This is where the cheap routers fall short. Most of these home grade consumer routers can't keep up with routing 1Gbit of traffic into the internet and can get overwhelmed by the traffic being too complex (Lots of tiny connections from various ports from a large number of clients). Proper enterprise grade routers have no trouble with this.

I found that i can actually predictably knock some crappy home routers offline by simply overwhelming them hard enough with traffic. Some even need a reboot to recover. The stress test is simply port scanning using nmap a large IP range as quickly as your PCs Ethernet port can send out tcp requests. Just to see what would happen i tried to send a flood of TCP requests at a friends router over the internet by sending them to his WAN IP and it crashed so badly it needed a reboot. At the same time my own MikroTik router was showing abnormally high CPU and RAM usage while routing the ~100Mbit/s of zero length ping requests, but internet inside my LAN kept working normally during that denial of service attack (The QOS routing was kicking in and load balancing the attack traffic with the traffic from other clients).

EDIT: This was done with my friend agreeing to it as an experiment, so it was nothing malicious.

[madires]

The reason for that is the typical architecture of a SOHO router. It's simply a MCU with 1 up to 3 ethernet interfaces and an ethernet switch chip. One ethernet interface is used to connect the MCU with the switch chip. While cheap MCUs with a single ethernet interface share that single link for LAN and WAN (traffic separated by VLAN), better ones use the second ethernet for a dedicated WAN port. Some MCUs have hardware NAT or other nice features integrated. All ethernet switching is done by the ethernet switch chip. Anything routed has to go through the MCU. On the software side you often face bufferbloat which causes traffic to stall. Some vendors still don't know about CoDel to solve the bufferbloat issue.

[Monkeh]

- Buy a router with SPF+ port and connect that using a SPF+ cable to my existing switch

There is absolutely no point in this as there will not be enough traffic to utilise it.

[madires]

BTW, there's 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T which work fine with Cat 5e cables. A few "high-end" SOHO routers provide a single 2.5GBASE-T port.

[Tom45]

I use a separate router for wired connections, and access points for wireless.

At home I have an old Netgear router which I think has been discontinued but it still works with no problems. More recently I've been using Ubiquiti Edgerouters.

For access points I now use Ubiquiti Unifi access points.

I don't have experience with a broad range of devices, so I can't say what is "best". But the Ubiquiti Edgerouters and Unifi access points do work well for a relatively modest amount of money.

[free_electron]

new router. here is the idea
port 1 - nas1
port 2 - nas2
port 3 - 24 port switch housefeed
port 4 - 8 portswitch - legacy devices ( old nas , home auto hubs and timecapsule ) old nas will be gone by end of year
port 5 - ipcams
port 6 - garage
port 7+8 link aggregation to office

Do you need the 8Gbps routed (network segmentation) or switched (one large LAN) ?

one large lan. but the layout has changed now. see picture.

[bd139]

Jebus. This is my day job and all I've got is a laptop, a router and an external USB drive 

[Monkeh]

Take all those NAS boxes off the router and put them on the switch. You do not need 10GigE on your router, you do not need a new router.

While you're at it forget having any wifi whatsoever on the router. It's a waste. Buy some nice Unifi APs and scatter them around (get a PoE capable switch).

[james_s]

I've always just looked at the supported hardware page for the open source Tomato firmware. I've been running it on various routers for more than a decade and have always been happy with it. Haven't really seen much difference in the hardware from one brand to another across the same generation, I figure most of them are probably pretty close to Broadcom reference designs.

[Berni]

Yep i also agree that there is no point in having a 10Gbit port on a router. You should just plug the modem and main switch into the router so that the only thing it does is route traffic out to the internet. You only need it once you have internet that is faster than 1Gbit, but good luck routing 10Gbit into the internet with any router that costs less than $500.

That is unless you want fancy routing rules with virtual LANs so that you can set what clients can access what areas of a LAN, cutting off some clients from the internet, etc... But if you want to do those sorts of stuff you need to buy an enterprise router anyway because the home toys don't have those features.

And yes Ubiquiti is the best large scale WiFi solution out there for a reasonable price.

[madires]

Since you need the router just for the internet uplink don't waste you money with 8 GigE ports and the SPF+ link between router and main switch. Some SOHO router with 4 GigE ports for LAN and another for WAN is totally fine. As monkey has already recommended, connect the NAS boxes to the main switch. Switch ports are cheap. This way you'll also get a lower latency in you LAN. IIRC, you've mentioned a WiFi extender. Two access points might be a better option than the router's WiFi plus extender. More flexible and more throughput.

[free_electron]

- Buy a router with SPF+ port and connect that using a SPF+ cable to my existing switch

There is absolutely no point in this as there will not be enough traffic to utilise it.

It will as i am using the ethernet ports on the router as an extension to my main switch fabric. I also want to hook up a harddisk to the usb3 port of the router.
instead of running a bunch of ethernet cables between my in-wall switching cabinet and my network rack to feed all the devices there , i can get away with a single SFP cable. i can pull out the existing cable from the pipe and pull a SFP cable in. it has to do with moving stuff into the network cabinet. All house wiring terminates in an in-wall cabinet where the main switch resides. Now there is a bunch of cables going in and out (so the door can;t close) going to the router , going to the nas boxes , traversing the room becasue there is not enough room in the in-wall pipe etc. i can do away with all that junk.

- in cabinet :
  - all nas boxes and iot hubs and other machinery
- in the pipe :
  - have one ethernet for modem to router
  - have one cat6 for future nas location
  - have one sfp cable to link router to main switch
- in the wall panel
  - main switch
  - docsis modem

so the room will be clean. no more stuff on the wall , on the floor, on the ceiling and cables everywhere. it is in the wall or in the cabinet.

The router i chose has 6 ethernet ports so i can hook up 6 devices where the router is. for the time being there will be some cables going to the old nas boxes but those are on the way out. in the coming months the data will be moved and they will be decommissioned. I have many nas boxes, simply because i got them free. they are old, slow and only hold 2 1tb drives + a dvd drive but they work well.

Ultimately The SFP link will feed data in and out of 3 NAS machines, the internet, and a usb connected harddisk. so i will have lots of traffic there but not enough to fill that pipe.

so here is the amended plan. This has been a good excercise in rethinking the structure and setup that has 'grown' over 10 years ...

[free_electron]

hmm. i like the idea of ditching the wifi and use a poe mesh. (but not googles. they already have too many fingers everywhere)

There is still the geographical issue. i want all the machinery in one cabinet. the pipe in the wall can only hold 4 wires really..
i could use two as 10G links. One for the future 10G nas and one to bundle 8 1GB links for the other stuff. ( legacy nas and iot stuff )
then i have two remiang. 1 for wan and a spare. that's good.

Then i can get away with a simple wired router that sits on a 1GB port.

i am thinking along these lines : (tell me if i am wrong)
i see the 10G links as an extention of my switching fabric. since none of the satellite switches will have more than 8 devices i can not exhaust the bandwidth on the 10G links.
So i have a bunch of 1Gbit ports that happen to be geographically distributed that behave as one big switch.

I could use 4 mikrotik switches (1 office, 1 garage , 1 cabinet and 1 in switch panel ) combined with a mikrotik 4 port 10G switch.
As long as i dont fill up a 10g link i am ok. That is doable.
That is cheaper than other solutions.
Add mesh wifi.
Add a good wired only router. <- so now we get here... since i am saving money : i want security. self-brew is not an option. i'm tired of endless mucking about. i want turnkey

[Berni]

Yep that does make more sense to me.

Also if you are going for security then don't use a home router to host a USB drive to the outside. A better option of that is to have a dedicated machine on the network that has ports open to the internet, but also has special routing rules to keep it isolated from the rest of the LAN (VLAN or something). Some extra routing rules then make the machine available to the LAN without open ports. This effectively makes that public facing machine look like its just another computer in the internet, except its inside your network so you have full bandwidth to it. Any compromise to the public facing machine only exposes the infected machine to the internet, but not your LAN clients. You don't want routers to respond to any WAN requests at all, let a sacrificial quarantined machine do the risky work of talking to the scary internet and keep it updated. That way any potential security breach is contained from exposing your internal LAN.

Also with so many NAS servers around it really makes sense for you to just buy a big old enterprise rack mount NAS server and stuff all of your drives into that and give it a dual 10 Gbit NIC. Much easier to manage things in one place and keep backups of important data.

[geekGee]

pfSense for me. Either build your own machine or consider one of the Netgate appliances.

Same here... originally on a couple generations of Soekris units but now using a Super Micro 1U Atom-based server.

[David Hess]

I also recommend using pfsense.  Either repurpose some old desktop hardware, buy something from Netgate if you want an embedded box, or build a new box using something like an Athlon 200GE.

Then get a VLAN gigabit switch and use it as a port expander.  Now the router can route between every switch port for maximum security and untrusted hardware can be isolated from other systems on your LAN and the internet if necessary.

For wireless, use separate access points rather than integrating this function into the router.

I just recently switched over to pfsense after running m0n0wall which it is based on for almost 20 years.  This morning I configured all DNS from my network, except that which already goes over a VPN, to get resolved using DNS over HTTPS/TLS.  The UK (and my ISP, Charter) can kiss my ass.