Best router out there?

[FatRakoon]

Possibly an odd question there, in that, what makes a router the best?

Most powerful wireless capabilities, most secure firewall, most this or that or easiest to config. The choices are vast and I fully accept that.

Right now, I am with Vodafone, and sure, huge mistake I know that, the useless gits, and so I am stuck with using their Modem, and so I have had to stop using my lovely ASUS N55 or whatever it was and so I bought the Asus RT-N66 and I absolutely love it for the huge amount of controls I have, but at the same time it is lacking on a few features, that I have seen in some of my other routers.

The Wireless power is rubbish, I have tried to resolve this with a number of things from different arials / aerials and boosters and bridges, btu in the end simply gave up and now all the rooms in my house, have an ethernet port.

Anyway, can anyone recommend any good routers, and let me know why they recommend it? Why should I consider it for my next router and of course, why its better than the Asus I am using now.

Thanks a lot.

 

[Mason64]

Asus RT-AC5300 AC5300 Tri-band Gigabit Router?

 

[neodude]

Ubiquiti Edge router with separate Ubiquiti AP or pfSense with separate Ubiquiti AP.

Enterprise Quality vs Consumer Quality at the end of the day. I've recently upgraded from an ASUS router to a pfSense & Unifi AP solution. The difference is like night and day, not had a single WiFi connection drop in the past fortnight, strong WiFi signal throughout the house and the amount of customisation in pfSense is amazing. The only downside is you really need to learn, at least a little, about networking.

 

[Rainmaker]

The 'best' router is always going to be one you build to spec yourself. I have a teeny PC Engines APU2C4 (1GHz quad core Jaguar, 4GB DDR3) with a 60GB mSATA SSD, running pfSense and handing off to an 8 port PoE switch. Wifi is handled by a Ubiquiti UAP AC PRO access point (powered by PoE and mounted on the ceiling for maximum coverage). In the new year I'll grab a Dell PowerEdge T20 and migrate the pfSense router/firewall to that.

Other options for rolling your own include:

GUI based
IPFire
Sophos UTM
ClearOS

CLI based
openBSD (mega secure, do it all from scratch)
VyOS (Juniper-like)
Debian or other Linux server install (using IPTables and masquerade)

There's a big list but they're the popular ones. You'll never get the same power, flexibility and control on a little commercial all-in-one that you will on custom built hardware designed to suit your exact specifications.

 

[RSR]

Another vote for a Ubiquiti Edge or Ubiquiti USG with a UniFi AP.

 

[DIABLO]

Possibly an odd question there, in that, what makes a router the best?

Most powerful wireless capabilities, most secure firewall, most this or that or easiest to config. The choices are vast and I fully accept that.

Right now, I am with Vodafone, and sure, huge mistake I know that, the useless gits, and so I am stuck with using their Modem, and so I have had to stop using my lovely ASUS N55 or whatever it was and so I bought the Asus RT-N66 and I absolutely love it for the huge amount of controls I have, but at the same time it is lacking on a few features, that I have seen in some of my other routers.

The Wireless power is rubbish, I have tried to resolve this with a number of things from different arials / aerials and boosters and bridges, btu in the end simply gave up and now all the rooms in my house, have an ethernet port.

Anyway, can anyone recommend any good routers, and let me know why they recommend it? Why should I consider it for my next router and of course, why its better than the Asus I am using now.

Thanks a lot.

How good the WiFi performs is dictated a lot by the positioning of the device, that is why i would opt for a separate AP/s as suggested above. I personally use a Ubiquiti USG as my Router and a Ubiquiti AP AC Lite on each floor of my house and it works great.

https://store.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-security-gateway.html
https://store.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac-lite.html

Plus you get fancy stats like this

Or if you just want a very good router the Ubiquiti EdgeRouterX is very good, comes with any feature you could think off but is easy to setup for a basic network with the inbuilt wizards and is only £50 https://store.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter-x.html

I have one but i only use it as a switch and to provide POE to a AP.

 

[killsta]

What's the main differences between the USG and the EdgerouterX in terms of features/functionality?

Do you lose anything with the cheaper EdgerouterX?

 

[DIABLO]

What's the main differences between the USG and the EdgerouterX in terms of features/functionality?

Do you lose anything with the cheaper EdgerouterX?

USG:
+ Can be administered from the Unifi controller software
- Has only basic Features you can actually adjust unless you want to do hacky **** because of the software as the hardware is basically a Edgerouter Lite.
- Twice the price of EdgerouterX for hardware which is not much different.

EdgeRouterX:
+Has every option you can think of to adjust but takes knowledge or fiddling but it does have wizards for the basics (for basic router, switch).
+Cheap, small.
+ Can be powered by 24v POE (24v is being phased out so new models manufactured might be standard POE + 24V POE not sure)
- Can't be administered centrally with unifi software.

So in essence the only negative which might not be a negative for you is no Unifi so no central administration and no prettiness like i posted above.

 

[killsta]

Awesome, thanks, think I may get the X!

 

[Psycho Sonny]

So would this

ER-X
Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X, 5-Port, single Passive PoE

+

UAP-AC-PRO
Ubiquiti UniFi AP, AC PRO

= pretty much the best router for <£175


how easy are these things to set up?

 

[killsta]

My X should be getting delivered today so I'll let you know

 

[DIABLO]

So would this

ER-X
Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X, 5-Port, single Passive PoE

+

UAP-AC-PRO
Ubiquiti UniFi AP, AC PRO

= pretty much the best router for <£175


how easy are these things to set up?

Unless they have updated the new ERX to be standard POE you wouldn't be able to power the AP Pro via POE pass though you would have to use the supplied injector. Only the Lite and LR support passive POE.

In that situation you would probably just to run one of the wizards.

decent enough setutp video as a basic router.

 

[FatRakoon]

Yes, I am seriously considering this Ubiquity now. More and more.

Possibly an embarrassingly thick question, but my current setup requires me to have 4 Switches on it.

One is in my attic. This was my first computer room. There is a few PCs in there

One is at my TV, where I have my Media PC, SKY, and XBOX360 connected to it.

The other is next to my Server.

The one near my TV stuff is connected to a HomePlug and also my sons Bedroom and my Daughters Bedroom, are both also connected to a HomePlug.
The 4th homeplug is connected to the Switch that goes to my server. That switch is directly connected to the Router.

One of the switches is an old Modem that I am using purely for the switch side and it works fine as-it-is, but of course I will be changing that for a proper switch.

I currently have 14 Pcs that are connected to my Network, obviously not all at once, although I did try that for a giggle. its useles to me.

The other LANin the house is in the extention, and that is because I can no longer get into the attic as easily as I used to. Those are on anothger LAN tahts joined througha switch to a homeplug and all of this all works very well because there is only actualyl one router on the LAN and that is my ASUS RTN66

The house also has 7 Laptops and I think 12 Mobile phones ( Mostly my problem as I have Note 3, Note 5, Blackberry Z10, 2 Windows phonmes and I also have 5 Tablets and all of these are all up and running - why you idiot? WHY? ) and foc ourse the family all have theirs too! - and I dont have any issues with network speed other than when my sons if playing on his XBOXone and I am also trying to download my torrents and the family are trying to watch Catch up TV emmerdale or Corrie, and sure, I suppore that it would start to show stress after all of that, but I take it that this ubiquiti is of course more than capable of doing all of that?

I will dig out a couple of Wifi plugs to give the network WiFi access too, the Modem, being WiFi might be good enough to give direct access to the internet... I dont need full access to the other devices really other than maybe files off the server and if that happens to be an issue, then I can connect to the expander box?

I dont know why the hell am I saying all of this? Hell, thats me all over, I always go off on one and I keep typing whats in my head...

 

[platypus]

Another vote for Ubiquiti USG and the UAP Pro.

 

[DIABLO]

My X should be getting delivered today so I'll let you know

Update the Firmware before you do anything as it adds more setup wizards.

 

[ov_sjo]

I use Mikrotik routers because they do everything and are cheap as chips.

 

[MassiveJim]

does the USG support fibre ?
I assume you would still need the external BT modem with it ?

I was after a good router with built in FTTC compatible modem

 

[platypus]

No you need an external modem.

Something like the Vigor 2860 would do what you want, or just pick up an external modem off the bay cheaply or get something like the Draytek Vigor 130.

 

[MassiveJim]

No you need an external modem.

Something like the Vigor 2860 would do what you want, or just pick up an external modem off the bay cheaply or get something like the Draytek Vigor 130.

I've got a 2850 in my business premises and I with my limited knowledge of what makes a router "good" I would say it has been rock solid since I installed it, it replaced an Asus DSL-N55, as I am looking to upgrade to fibre in the near future, so the Draytek being able to handle DSL and fibre made sense.