Can you recommend a router for home office?

toja

toja

toja

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Joined
9 Apr 2020
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3
I need a router that can do more than just standard Virgin Media hub. It will be mainly used for SOHO so that some working from home (WFH) and evening gaming sessions can be run by children while we are still working. Also, since it will be used for my little office, remote access such as VPN should be supported (at least 1-2 tunnels).
Broadband speeds of up to 1Gb expected, DDNS, VPN, usual firewall and NAT settings for Raspberry Pi projects such as a web server or smart home.
Any wifi router recommendations are welcome. Please post your router model used, what is it used for so, and why this one so that will help me to choose the best model. Price can exceed £130 but the range is up to £400. Thanks!
 
BigT said:
How handy are you with networking in general? I think with the speeds you have and the VPN and server hosting requirements then I'd suggest start looking away from all-in-ones (unless you go Mikrotik which has a very steep learning curve). So an appropriate wireless access point for your home/office (can't say which without knowing more about the building layout and construction) and a separate router.

I run pfSense on a Protectli mini PC which is up to the job and meets your requirements. I don't have your internet speeds but it has been rock solid for years on FTTC (via BTOR modem). It runs an OpenVPN server, runs three commercial VPN client interfaces with selective policy based routing out from the LAN, separate VLANs for tagged guest WiFi traffic (from Ubiquiti access points), DDNS client, port forwarding to my Nginx reverse proxy to serve a few select things out to the internet like Bitwarden and Plex requests etc. Once upon a time it ran tri-WAN with LTE modems in the mix too with policy based routing to ensure I always had sufficient precious little bandwidth at the time for my work stuff. Pretty much everything you're asking for.

Equally you could run another *sense variant if you have higher morals than me or for a small price and a very nice interface (but with all the power/configurability of *sense) you could go for Untangle for your router software. Also instead of a mini, multi-NIC PC you could go for a second hand small form factor PC with a dual-NIC card for a fair bit less but plenty of horsepower for gigabit routing and VPN. I know it seems like a lot and separating duties seems like more cables, mess and cost but in the long term it'll serve you well and you can upgrade piecemeal as new tech arrives and it'll work on Virgin just as well as any other internet connection type in the future.
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That's an interesting option, it seems to be free too. Except the part where I need to source a compatible mini PC, an extra NIC card, and some wifi APs.
Did you run multi WAN config on a free version?
 
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