Wireless AC for VM 152MB

enigmo · 23 Jun 2014 at 10:14

I am shortly to be moving from 60MB VM to 152MB VM and am thinking about a new router to take advantage of it. Currently, I have an old D-Link DIR-855, and while I have no real issues with the router itself, it's 5GHz range is laughable. As well as the faster BB speeds, I would also like to move to as many of my clients onto wifi as possible (an ancillary benefit of moving to a proper house with reasonable walls vs a Victorian built bunker with 19" thick concrete!), so there will be multiple wireless clients covering g, n, and ac.

With that in mind, I was looking at the current batch of 802.11ac routers, specifically the Netgear R7000 and Asus AC68U, and how workable they might be. I'm not too fussed about waiting for the new AC2300 routers and you can wait forever chasing the next best thing. As well as the multiple clients, it would also be nice if it fed some sort of ac bridge, but I understand at the moment that might basically mean a second unit of the same model, so might live without that for now. A consideration is also that I run several VMs and IP based devices and so do set up a few different port forwarding ranges and virtual servers on my current router.
I guess my question is; considering I want this setup to be workable and reliable for the next 4-5 years and have a budget of £300, would the current crop of ac routers be my best bet, or would something more corporate like UniFi be a better option?

Edit: Of course I know Unifi wireless would still leave me needing a router and bridging unit, so this is not ideal and possibly more expense for no real benefit to me.

lamboman · 23 Jun 2014 at 13:36

It might help to elaborate a bit more on your requirements. What additional functionality will you need? What are these virtual servers for, VPN?

From what you have described however, I'd pick the AC68U over the R7000 purely because of the third-party firmware support afterwards (Merlin, Tomato and the like).

enigmo · 23 Jun 2014 at 14:36

There is one machine that acts as a general file server and RDP jumpbox, another that acts as a media server, a Proliant acting as a NAS/backup box, VMs for downloads and uploads in general, another running several game servers each with their own port forwarding ranges, several security cameras all with web interfaces, a web server, an ftp server, a couple of experimental VMs, shortly a FreeNAS box... It goes on

enigmo · 23 Jun 2014 at 15:08

lamboman said:
From what you have described however, I'd pick the AC68U over the R7000 purely because of the third-party firmware support afterwards (Merlin, Tomato and the like).

And that's even over the R7000 with dd-wrt? Have to say, I've got a lot of hacked and modded stuff, but never my router.

lamboman · 23 Jun 2014 at 16:33

enigmo said:
And that's even over the R7000 with dd-wrt? Have to say, I've got a lot of hacked and modded stuff, but never my router.

DD-WRT is pretty poor to be honest. Release cycles and the releases themselves are all over the place, router support is all over the place, and quite a lot of it just doesn't work all that well. I can't really elaborate as I haven't used DD-WRT in years, however DD-WRT is seen as being very much sub-par compared with the likes of Tomato nowadays, particularly for QoS (though I doubt that you'll want to run QoS at 150+Mbps on any consumer router as I'm not sure that even these two are fast enough, and you probably wouldn't need QoS on a residential connection that fast anyway).

Sorry, should have been clear, I was asking about what you currently have running on the router itself

It looks like you're just looking for a unit to perform the "usual" tasks (DHCP, DNS forwarding, routing etc.) but is fast and stable, in which case the AC68U would be fine.

Only thing to be aware of with the AC68U is that the USB port performance is poor. That said, if you've got dedicated machines, you wouldn't be using those ports anyway.

enigmo · 24 Jun 2014 at 10:44

True. My current D-Link does USB printer sharing and it's a royal pain in the backside, so I won't be playing with that again, unless I can plug in a drive and script rsync mobile contents on connection!
But yes, I do really just need a router that does all the usual tasks, just more of them than routers I've used in the past. e.g. My old 3com roputer was limited to 10 port forward ranges. This wasn't enough so was replaced. My current DIR-855 does maybe 20 static dhcp allocations, which also isn't enough. Hopefully this will do it all as much as I need it to.
Ta