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.
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
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.
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 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.
Any old hardware and run opnsense or pfsense (the former preferred)
I’ve been very happy with the Glinet Flint2. I think it checks most (if not all) your boxes.
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.
Pretty much any router will handle that.
If you want do open source, you can do something like opnwrt on hardware they support. Or, build the whole thing yourself with opnsense on any device that can run FreeBSD.
What are good brands that don’t sell your data? Is TP-link okay?
FWIW their Kasa line of smart switches started getting pretty shitty about needing an account and internet access to work.
You can still run the smart switches locally if you have the ones that support matter. But yeah, the old ones do require internet connection, which sucks.
I got them to work by putting them on the IOT vlan and only letting them talk to homeassistant. But the app for the initial setup needs internet access and an account, which was not the case when I bought them.
So it’s possible, but it’s a pain in the ass and they’re definitely on the never-buy-again list.
I just got a wavlink. This model isn’t available, which I got to replace a previous wavlink that I’ve had for years. The OS has all the things you’re asking for.
I use AT&T as my ISP and their router software is workable at least. It can assign static IPs and do port forwarding; enough for a basic home lab and some self hosting. If you absolutely need to be in full control of your network, most off-the-shelf name-brand router/APs will do. At that point in your journey, I’d recommend a Mikrotik hax3. You don’t need to dive into the advanced stuff in Router OS, they have a quick setup that’s good enough but you can go deeper if you need. Though I will say there’s a learning cliff.
To add to this users data, I used my supplied att router for Homelab stuff for like a year and it worked very well. I did go back to openwrt but didn’t really need to, just for familiarity’s sake. My networking needs at the time were headscale/wireguard and adguard home. All my other services were unaffected by switching routers.
You want the gl inet brume 2 and the gli inet beryl ax.
The router is the brume. Access point is the beryl ax (which can also be a router in its own right if you wanted).
Both dont share data. Both are 100% open source. You can replace the access point with the wifj 7 version at a later date without changing router settings. Should be able to get them both for 140 total. Available on amazon. Mine have been going for 3 years solid. Easily meets your speed requirements.
This is the open source and much cheaper equivalent to Unifi, and its fantastic