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!
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.