Ask HN: Recommendations for New Router

2 points by deepdmistry 3 years ago | 8 comments

Hello, looking for recommendations for a new router that can satisfy following needs.

1. Future proof 2. Multi level home ( around 3000 sq ft ) 3. Can support many many devices ( have a ton of stuff due to all the smart home stuff ) i have a bridge but still 4 Both wife and I work from home and could be on zoom at once, along with more 4K videos being streamed on other devices. 5. We have Verizon fios gigabit connection. 6. We have a lot of content on an external drive and would prefer to have that be available as network drive.

Can provide more details if necessary.

rektide 3 years ago |

"A" router will probably not satisfy. Even placed in the most ideal spot, there will probably be places with poor coverage. If someone is there, everyone else will likely have a bad time (unless everyone upgrades to only having Wifi 6 devices).

Good coverage is a matter of having more access points. Most off the shelf mesh systems will do fine.

Personally I enjoy systems that actually leave me empowered & knowing what is going on, but A) running OpenWRT & DAWN (to bandsteer clients) is not that easy and B) the available hardware has been absolutely miserable in the past couple of years, with 802.11ax only barely becoming available. My roommates had a second Google Mesh wifi router system & it worked flawlessly, without any of the pain & suffering, & had good visibility. However it lacks the USB NAS capability. Honestly I think most systems would serve you fine & your requirements are unspecial & uninteresting: you'll have a fine time with any vaguely competent mesh system. Especially if it has 3+ nodes.

GianFabien 3 years ago | |

Products sold as "routers" are technically a gateway router, firewall, ethernet switch and one or two access points in a single shiny plastic box. All run by the cheapest CPU with smallest RAM that yields sufficient profit at that price point.

When you don't run any ethernet cabling, mesh network device placement is critical because the back-haul needs to get an adequate signal to the originating device as well as provide good coverage for its area. The construction materials of the home have a big impact upon what works and what doesn't.

rektide 3 years ago | | |

I was skeptical of the Google Mesh product too but this is a very big & weirdly spaced out row house with very intense double-thick & overbuilt internal walls/floors, and seeing how well the Google Mesh products did, how low the latency was & high the bandwidth was in even some of the weirdest setups: it incredibly impressed me. I'd been a believer in APs with fixed ethernet, a huge skeptic of mesh backhauls, but my roommates spending $229 to build a secondary network enormously proved my doubts wrong. Now I think this needs to be seen to believed & that most skepticism is incredibly misplaced.

The seeming truth of the matter is that most wifi devices just have terrible radio gear. The mesh units said they only had so-so signal in my house, but they just had so very much better radios. I don't think we had a single client device anywhere would ever dip below 300mbps if it's radio could get that high. The backhauls for most mesh gear are incredibly good. I would put away your fear, in most cases. These products work incredibly good. Sometimes you may indeed need to add one more node to make all your problems go away - to make the hops physically shorter, to give the backhauls shorter/lower-interference links - but that's much much easier than dropping ethernet, is such an easy chore to deal with. Any potential problem can be solved by adding more nodes, creating a denser / less long distance mesh.

If you really demand on gigabit (really, post-gigabit; mesh can definitely do gigabit) everywhere, yes, you may need to raise your spend a lot, and use 2.5Gbit ethernet APs that can bandsteer among themsleves. Frankly I think this is kind of a suckers game for 99.99% of people. The mesh products are amazing. Their latency & responsiveness is incredibly good, the bandwidth far more than adequate. Many have very reasonable costs, where-as most multi-AP solutions cost unreasonably more for no reason other than market-segmentation-exploitation.

Ideally the WAN access is not "at one end" of the mesh, but even if it is, I think it'll probably be solid for most folks in most circumstances.

guiambros 3 years ago |

You didn't say anything about budget, security requirements, or advanced config vs. plug'n play set up, so pretty much any prosumer mesh router/wifi would fit your requirements - Asus ROG, Linksys, Google WiFi, etc.

My personal / recommended setup:

- For firewall: pfSense (or OPNsense, if you prefer a truly open alternative)

- For L2/L3 switching: Ubiquiti Switch, with PoE

- For WiFi access points: as many Ubiquiti Access Points as needed (I use FlexHD; easy installation if you already have the cabling, but there are other alternatives, including ceiling mounts, APs for outdoors, etc). I use a dedicated UniFi CloudKey, but you can also use a Docker container or your own vm

IMO this gives you the perfect balance between flexibility and control, without requiring too much maintenance. While I'm frustrated with some recent political crap from Ubiquiti [1], the wifi is rock solid, and the products are top notch.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ubiquiti

deepdmistry 3 years ago | |

Thanks! Security and privacy, while are pretty important to me (more than the average joe, are not a make or break thing). Although i wish otherwise, i do not have the time to go mucking around too much in advanced configs, so pretty much a plug and play setup is what id be looking for next few years.

GianFabien 3 years ago |

I have reservations about most commercial products. I would build a router using OpenBSD. Then run Cat5e/6 cables to several access points to provide adequate coverage. Keep the smart home stuff on 2.4GHz WiFi and run laptops, tablets on 5GHz WiFi - ideally different SSIDs. I would connect the network drive with wired ethernet.

Your fios connection shouldn't be the problem. But WiFi, being RF, can often be a limiting factor.

blueridge 3 years ago |

I'm a big fan of Peplink:

https://www.peplink.com/products/balance-series/

https://www.peplink.com/products/soho-series/

pettycashstash2 3 years ago |

I recommend Ubiquity.