New Home Router Search.

DustyMiller · 1 Sep 2022 at 09:16

I'm looking for a new router to replace my ageing Linksys WRT 1900ACS.

I'm after a router with good throughput as I'm going to move to CityFibre shortly, and want - if possible 2.5Gbe ethernet ports, as I have a multi gig Zyxel switch. Not that fussed on the Wifi, as I am thinking of adding a Mesh Wifi system to cover the house, as the router location is in the office at one end of the house.

It would be nice if the new system was OpenWRT compatible, but that is not essential these days.

ChrisD. · 1 Sep 2022 at 09:18

Have you looked at the TopTon NUC type appliances? Not sure I can mention where to get them from.

WJA96 · 3 Sep 2022 at 15:00

I’m not sure what 2.5GbE ports in your router give you if you’re uplinking to a 2.5GbE switch because (currently) the incoming traffic won’t exceed 1Gbps. Anyway, you want 2.5GbE on the router so I would suggest the Mikrotik RB5009UG+S+IN which is very powerful for the money and offers 10GbE as well through SFP+.

RB5009UG+S+IN | MikroTik

The ultimate heavy-duty home lab router with USB 3.0, 1G and 2.5G Ethernet and a 10G SFP+ cage. You can mount four of these new routers in a single 1U rackmount space! Unprecedented processing power in such a small form factor.

mikrotik.com

Like @ChrisD. I would be looking at an Intel N5105 or N6005 appliance with the Intel i225 Rev3 chipset.

Cheap Intel Pentium N6005 4x 2.5GbE Fanless Firewall and Router Review

We take a look at the cheap Intel Pentium N6005 4x 2.5GbE offerings for firewalls, routers, and virtualization to see if it is useful

www.servethehome.com

or the new Netgate 4100 which performs well but at really low power.

Netgate 4100 pfSense Plus Router-Firewall-VPN Appliance Review

In our Netgate 4100 review, we see what this pfSense Plus-based router, firewall, VPN box and more offers including Intel QAT support

www.servethehome.com

Silicon Si · 3 Sep 2022 at 21:31

Nothing on the net is going to even get close to 1Gbe your bound by the webservers speeds etc.

Sparx · 4 Sep 2022 at 18:16

Silicon Si said:
Nothing on the net is going to even get close to 1Gbe your bound by the webservers speeds etc.

Huh? I can reach 1Gb downloading from plenty of places. That’s easily achieved these days.

ChrisD. · 4 Sep 2022 at 18:31

Silicon Si said:
Nothing on the net is going to even get close to 1Gbe your bound by the webservers speeds etc.

Nonsense.

WJA96 · 5 Sep 2022 at 23:26

In our old office we had a 2Gbps leased line and very, very, few connections got close to using half of it. Which was the main reason it wasn’t renewed. I currently have a 1Gbps and a 900Mbps connection at home (business and personal lines) and it’s very rare that I see sustained 1 Gbps traffic except when we establish a backup connection to one of the other home offices.

I‘m sure there are servers on the internet capable of feeding a 1Gbps connection for sustained periods but I suspect they will fairly rare or only at non-peak times. Probably lots of them are torrent sites etc. Sky, BBC, Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. don‘t seem to want to feed my gear that fast although I suspect that’s because they’re splitting their bandwidth for QoS purposes.