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by hak8or 1587 days ago
Mikrotik makes some very capable routers. The Rb4011 is incredibly powerful and very low power, and has an SFP+ port, so you can use a sfp+ to rj45 if needed, or straight modem -> sfp+ connection, to get faster than 1 gig speeds.

It has a steep learning curve though, albeit it's extremely rewarding and powerful once you gwr over that curve. It should handle routing 1 gig with zero issues, and is under $200. You can do bonding, vlans, esoteric ip rules, and tons of "misc" functionality.

Do not go with ubiquiti, their hardware is very poor and their UI is very buggy and simply poorly designed, it's focused on people who know a bit above an average person about networking, which I suspect is not the case for most people here.

1 comments

I have that router, and it can do up to about 2.5Gb/s with actual routing. I have it on a 10GBe direct connect to my "main" 4 port switch, but that just means it can take in multiple unrouted LAN segments.

Once you start doing much esoteric the speed slows down, if you get off the fast path it can be pretty intense (thought they do sell bigger ones that can route more packets).

I like that Mikrotik are very transparent about it. On their site they publish performance test results in various configurations.
Agreed, it's nice to have the number right there and they don't make claims beyond what it actually can do (and arguably, when you're up at 10GB+ your router and your switch shouldn't be the same hardware anymore).