[Arie]

I love the ER-X because it's cheap, generally available and a fine router with SQM. Just keep in mind that with smart queue enabled it will top out at about 150-170Mbit. If you're on a faster connection the Edgerouter ER4 with its faster quad core CPU should be able to handle up to about 300-350Mbit.

When you need to shape even more bandwidth, routers based on the Marvel XP Armada chipset do very well. I flashed a Linksys WRT1900ACS with OpenWRT and was able to shape about 600-750Mbps before it ran out of horsepower.

[matwood]

> I love the ER-X because it's cheap

I love my ER-X, but once I got my gigabit connection it can't quite keep up compared to plugging directly into the modem. It's close enough that I'm not looking to replace it, but the next time I need a router I may go the NUC build your own route.

[0xffff2]

How does one go about building a router from a NUC? Don't you need two NIC's for a router? (One for the modem, one to connect a switch for the LAN.) Or have enough people given up on wired networking that they just build routers where the entire LAN is on WiFi?

[jonathanlydall]

If you have a VLAN capable switch and appropriate network card with the right drivers, then you can have all the logical ports you could possibly want.

I have done this at my parents place with a cheap Intel Celeron based computer with a single network port, but 2 logical networks with vlanning. One is for their personal network and the other is for their guest suite they offer through Airbnb.

It’s only 20MB/s fibre, so not much cpu power needed. The no name computer cost less than $250, came with a 60gb SSD and I put pfsense on it.

[matwood]

You can get NUCs with dual NICs or just use one of the mini PCs out there. Ars has few articles building a home brew router with speed comparisons.

[supertrope]

Turn on hwnat to keep up with gigabit. (It won't keep up with simultaneous gigabit down and up).