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!
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.