If you don’t want to read my nonsense, scroll down to the bottom.
It’s been a long time since I setup my home network. My last router was the R7000 which served its purpose for about nine years. This time, before following the same setup I have done for the last 15+ years, I was curious about the latest trends and ensure I don’t miss out on something new. Everything that can be wired, is wired. I set certain devices on the network with a static IP (video scalers, Memcard pros, raspberry pi’s, arcade units, game consoles(do they still need static IP addresses these days to allow with specific ports to the forwarded?) I have a bunch of gigabit switches, primarily in one room that houses most of my stuff.
Why am I looking into changing?
About a year ago we changed to Verizon fios and they gave me a router, which I scoffed at since “I don’t need the router my service gives me for free” (and yeah, this one is actually a free one, I declined it and told the installer I don’t want one and he left it) a G3100.
After my R7000 kicked the bucket at 2am after a poorly done firmware update - oops, I needed a new router and almost ordered one on Amazon, but figured I would use the free one in my home until I did research. I was immediately blown away. How crap this was so much faster than my other router. I was getting download speeds 5-10 times faster. The only issue it apparently can only do 10 static addresses, which is not enough.
Didn’t want to waste time reading? This message is entirely too long.
This prompted me to see what was available these days. I saw 6ghz networks? CAT8? I didn’t even know we had CAT7?! Mesh networks (even though I really don’t care about wireless, it can be bothersome to drop my network right outside my house) would this help my small devices receive a signal tucked away behind a cabinet? My needs are about 80 or so devices at a time, let’s say about 20 devices with static ip addresses, but that could be a lot more. My plan is the gigabit (900ish Mbits) are there faster switches than a gigabit, and does it matter? I do have a network that is not attached to the router, that simply has older consoles hooked up to shared networked drives for game images.
Anyway, what router do you all recommend? Do I care about mesh? Should I upgrade switches and wires? What is the deal!? What’s the new and upcoming network trends that everyone is excited about?
Coming from an R7000 too, go with Ubiquiti for a home setup. I went all in with a UDM-SE and small AP’s and haven’t had issues, this being my first home setup, everything was a breeze.
You haven’t told me what speeds you get, so it’s really hard to give you a recommendation.
The biggest, most important trend that is being ignored by the majority at the moment is Bufferbloat, and the fix is being called everything from SQM to AQM to Flow Queueing. If you have that integrated, it makes life so much nicer on the internet.
CAKE (Common Applications Kept Enhanced) is the finest implementation in this regard.
OpenWRT supports it, firewalla supports it, amazon eero and google wifi support it, mikrotik supports it… But it needs processing power - how much depends on how much bandwidth your link is.
that’s why I got my mikrotik hap ax2 in the first place
I used to use a VM running on my NAS with PCI passthru of an intel gigabit card for wan, and sr-iov passthru for lan. It worked pretty well but the host OS wasnt made to be the best hypervisor so I had reliability issues i couldnt iron out. It was fast as fuck tho, the NAS was my old i9 10850K gaming PC
I ended up buying a chinese fanless celeron mini pc. It has 6 2.5gbps intel i226 NICs. It cant handle IDS/IPS, but its doing fine with my dual gigabit wans and several lans and prefix delegations.
At one point in time i used a very cheap dual realltek nic mini pc, and even that worked fine. Hardware has never really been the bottleneck, its always knowledge limited which is great because theres nothing better than free “upgrades” from leveling up your skills
The latest trend is Ubiquiti, as you can easily remote manage it from an app. Many other companies have followed suit. I’ve used the Snap AV products for years, as they have their OVRC app to manage all this, as well as a wattbox for remote rebooting, incase I loose internet, or just a fresh reboot weekly.
It sounds like your cabling is fine for what you use. The latest trend in wireless, is Wifi 6, and just use POE switches for access points to get your wireless needs. This also frees up resources for a router, to just be a router, instead of going the all in one route. Also, this future proofs your setup, as with the changing wifi standards, you just program new access points as needed, instead of having to rebuild your entire network again. D-Link makes some solid access points, for reasonable, as well as their managed 1200 series switches have been bulletproof for me. Ubiquiti has APs, as well as managed switches, again, if you wish to switch to their eco system.
Good to hear cables haven’t changed. I remember telling people over 20 years ago that CAT 5 cables and CAT 5e cables were ridiculous because no one was transferring over 12MB per second, lol. When I did my last setup I put in CAT6, but it seems there was not reason over CAT5(e). Good to hear that I don’t need CAT 8. Although, I am sure there are some use cases.
CAT 8 is ridiculous. By the time you would need CAT 8 it would probably be better to run fiber optics in the house. I’m looking to run Ethernet soon and will run either CAT 6 or CAT 6a depending on the difference in price but I could get away with CAT 5e easily for current needs I just want to be ready if I ever go to to multi-gig service.
Firstly, static IPs are a PITA. do yourself a favor and set up DHCP reservations for the devices you want to have static addresses.
Second, the main trend is deintegrating routing and WiFi. So get a device that’s just a router: pfSense, mikrotik, firewalla, ubiquity, etc. Then put up Wi-Fi access points, usually multiples, to get better full-home coverage for wireless devices. If the APs have a wired connection to the router (wired backbone) this is best, rather than sharing the uplink via a dedicated wireless channel or a mesh network. Ubiquity, tp-link Omada, ruckus, Aruba instant-on, are all popular options I see recommended here.
Advanced trends: creating segmentation between your iot devices and main network for enhanced security. This typically involves creating and configuring vlans, which may require upgrading any unmanaged switches you have to managed/smart switches.
Yes! I’ll definitely look into this. Although, my r7000 handled static great, when there was a problem it was exhausting trying to get it to work. Which always seemed to end up with me rebooting it. :/ My setup is an old android tablet with a webpage saved for each scaler. When I want to change any settings for my genesis scaler, I click on that and change the settings. And I can quickly do this for all of my scalers. I had this on my phone, but I have 9 of them and sometimes they would get closed or need to be reopened, or sometimes I just didn’t have my phone next to me while I was gaming. If I don’t want them set to a specific IP, I will lose my ability to open that specific unit. (Although, since my new router hides its settings for static, I haven’t had this for the past couple of weeks)
I’d still recommend reserved IPs instead of static IPs, for that case, although, it sounds like local DNS would also meet your need. Firewalla will give you local DNS out of the box. Other firewalls might require you to configure dnsmasq aliases yourself.
The G3100 from Verizon is really not that bad as far as ISP equipment goes. (Tri-band WiFi 6) but their App is pure trash, thankful for the web interface, but it’s till ISP equipment so I understand why people scoff at it.
A lot of people in this sub will recommend a DIY setup with separate components (router, switch, Access Points) and that’s great if you’re setup for that but not everyone is and not everyone has the technical acumen to take advantage of such a system.
I personally have whole home Ethernet and two Amplifi Aliens in a wired backhaul and it’s perfectly fine.
IMHO get what works best for you and meets your needs and take every recommendation with a grain of salt because what works “perfectly” for one might not be as effective in the next persons environment.
Thanks, I immediately saw the DIY angle on all the posts and honestly, I’m relieved. I always use Reddit to find answers, but never have posted. My first post and I was curious on what type of response I was going to get. I thought I might get a bunch of responses with different consumer routers to buy, which would have been fine too. But, like I mentioned in an another reply, I now have rabbit holes to go down and you all have given me some good advice on how to approach them.
I run OPNsense on a Sophos SG 230 with some upgrades and deployed a Sophos SG 135 running OPNsense at my dads house last weekend.
Edit: without Zenarmor, the Sophos SG 135 can easily push > 1 GBit/s across networks.
Haven’t looked into Vyos yet.
I’ll check that out too!