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by fro0116 3009 days ago
Do you have any recommendations for alternatives?
5 comments

Separate the function of wifi and router. My home office, which is bottlenecked by the docsis3.0 last mile, is on a Ubiquiti edgerouter-x ($46) router. And then a single ubnt UAP-AC 2X2 MIMO, dual band 802.11ac AP ($79).

The OS on the ubnt edgerouter series is a fork of vyatta, which is Debian based.

Also for people who know what they are doing, a mikrotik rb3011 would be a good choice.

I've generally found the Ubiquiti hardware to be a fair bit better than Mikrotik stuff (way better forwarding speeds with the accelerated Cavium processors in the EdgeRouters - except the ER-X, which doesn't have the hardware offload but is still useful). I find their web UI far less confusing too. I know some guys who have used Mikrotiks a lot and swear by it, but unless you're already experienced with Mikrotik interfaces I'd recommend the Ubiquiti.

They also have a really good command line interface - which is lucky, because the biggest downside with the Ubiquitis is that some (generally more obscure and advanced) features can't be configured through the web UI.

> Also for people who know what they are doing

The recommendation for the rb3011; or winbox and routerOS in general?

While it is not perfect. I do not know of other vendors with open docs like the mikrotik wiki[0].

With winbox, wiki, and not to bad cli. I feel it a good starting point for non network engineers. Better then horrible web interface or arcane cli interface.

Any recommendations for someone that want to learn to know what they are doing?

[0]: https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Main_Page

Asus+Merlin firmware is what I am running now. Stable, with enough features included out of the box. Compared to the bundled horror from the TelCo I get nearly 3x wifi performance on -ac.

In the ski lodge, OpenWRT and a $20 TP-Link have uptime measured in years by now. OpenWRT is awesome.

Uptime in years mean you have no security - there has been a couple of horrible WPA2 faults fixed in the last year.
Problem with OpenWRT is that most people run it on garbage consumer-grade hardware.
As opposed to what, more expensive Ubiquiti hardware that uses the same processors and radios?
The intentions of the developers are good, but just try getting full kernel level documentation out of a company like Broadcom.
There's a bunch of 'reference' devices that runs OpenWRT well. The list is pretty long

https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_864

I personally had good experiences with TP-Link Archer C7 and GL Networks mini-routers.

That page is impossible.
I love Asus networking products.

The N generation like the RT-N12 is dirt cheap now. I deploy them in client offices and they have uptime measured in years.

It's not WiFi Ac and I don't care. It stays stable, has guest WiFi networks, and usable firmware.

Netgate router board with a mSATA drive and PFSense for the router. Ubiquiti APs for wireless. Run the Ubiquiti unifi software from a Docker image on your workstation or home server. Cisco SG-nnn series switches.