Finally joined the 21st century. New WiFiless router Q

DBT85

DBT85

DBT85

Soldato
Joined
8 Oct 2006
Posts
5,784
Location
Midlands
Backstory. Moved to farm from city, 6mb internet even with fttc, many tears of sadness. 3 years pass, new cabinet installed, switched yesterday, jumped to 37mb on a max 40mb connection. Many tears of joy, will be swapping to a new provider (probably plusnet or voda) as soon as the online checkers realise we have been moved over becase frankly sky won't do us better than £38 for upto 80mb and phone line (despite offering it for £28 for new customers) and others will do it for £26 or around that.


Anyway, I don't need WiFi from a router. I have 2 Ubiquiti UniFi ceiling warts due to the house layout and size. With that in mind, if I wanted to sort my own new router out to have a bit more control than whatever I get from Sky, Voda, Plusnet etc, where do my eyes need to be looking at? I literally have no idea and its been a looong time since I looked at anything beyond the stuff that came from the provider.

Many thanks.
 
How much do you want to spend?

What do you want to be able to control?

Replacing routers 'just because' is daft. Replacing them even before you have tried the ISP supplied router is even dafter.
 
Also how handy are you with networking in general? CLI scare you at all? Some recommendations, depending on your answers to @bremen1874 's questions, may be quite full on.
 
Right now I don't have an idea whether I'll even bother, in part because I don't know how good the supplied router is going to be. I've made do with the supplied ones from sky and BT for like 7 years with no real issues, but I've also not gone digging to see if I could have been doing anything better or differently.

I'd better have a look around.

CLI doesn't bother me but invariably when I start tinkering with that side of things I feel "why don't these ******** speak MY English" so I don't go too far!

The network here was all put in by me so the hardware side doesn't bother me at all. The software side is largely an unknown outside of Windows shares and the unifi software. My stuff just works so I've not gone poking it.
 
The only ISP router that ever caused me issues was Vodafone's which seemingly struggled to route traffic the 50 odd devices on my network. But my actual reason for changing, regardless of ISP, is because I wanted to have rate/time limited guest VLANs routed onto my slower non data-capped gateway, multiple WAN gateways at the time (4G and fibre), a VPN server for remote access back into my network and VPN clients on my router with policy based routing which the ISP routers won't do. Most people want to change because the perceived WiFi is not up to what they want but you have that sorted. I say try the ISP one and see what you feel lacking before spending money un-necessarily.
 
The biggest complaint you generally find for ISP supplied hardware is wifi coverage/speed, this is usually a combination of a compromised AIO design built to a price and installed in a poor location, the 'cool' response was to replace the router with another AIO installed in the same awful location. You've avoided that with the UnifiAP's. Pretty much everything else is after that is usually into the territory of having quite specific needs, try the ISP supplied router, if its not for you, post an update and i'm sure you'll get recommendations.
 
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