A good, reliable gigabit router


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Which brand has a good and reliable gigabit router for under $100?  I have the airport extreme base station and love the 802.11ac speeds but I find the router settings to be lacking.  I was thinking of using it as an AP only and getting a gigabit router.

 

The asus rt-n65u looks good and is $85 on Amazon.  I obviously won't be using the built in wifi on the router so that feature doesn't matter.  Any suggestions?

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Smallnetbuilder (website) has WAN-to-LAN-speeds for a lot of router hardware, you might want to look there.

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The Asus is rock solid.

 

That is the one I am leaning toward.  That and my two new netgear gs108na switches and my home network will be set.  Once I have everything put together I shall do a vizio diagram and see what everyone thinks of it.

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"but I find the router settings to be lacking."

What features are you looking for that the APE is lacking in.. To me any soho router is going to be lacking, not only in horsepower but feature sets. So sort of features are you looking for. While a benchmark in wan to lan is nice to know that it can handle your internet connection, in the bigger picture this is minor point of a feature set. What is your internet connection speed btw?

You mention some smart switches, are you doing vlans - if so need to make sure your new edge router supports I would assume - I don't think think the gs108s can do layer3 routing or intervlan routing, etc.

Once we get some idea of the things you want to do, we can find something that fits best for your budget, etc.

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I have ASUS RT-AC68U and it's running like a boss with uptime of 2 months since last firmware update. No devices dropped, iDevices and Android based devices are living like a family.

You can go for any wireless-ac based ASUS router. ASUS is giving great firmware support.

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I have ASUS RT-AC68U and it's running like a boss with uptime of 2 months since last firmware update. No devices dropped, iDevices and Android based devices are living like a family.

You can go for any wireless-ac based ASUS router. ASUS is giving great firmware support.

 

That's great but I am not replacing an almost brand new base station with another wireless unit.

"but I find the router settings to be lacking."

What features are you looking for that the APE is lacking in.. To me any soho router is going to be lacking, not only in horsepower but feature sets. So sort of features are you looking for. While a benchmark in wan to lan is nice to know that it can handle your internet connection, in the bigger picture this is minor point of a feature set. What is your internet connection speed btw?

You mention some smart switches, are you doing vlans - if so need to make sure your new edge router supports I would assume - I don't think think the gs108s can do layer3 routing or intervlan routing, etc.

Once we get some idea of the things you want to do, we can find something that fits best for your budget, etc.

 

the gs108na are not smart switches.  they are unmanaged switches.  the gs108t are the smart switches.

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ah ok - so no vlans then. So what features are you looking for - what does the APE lack that your looking to do?

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If you don't mind the slight lack of configuration, the AEBS is the best wireless router I've come across.

What would you like to do that the AEBS can't do?

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ah ok - so no vlans then. So what features are you looking for - what does the APE lack that your looking to do?

So the basics of this:

1: all bedrooms, secondary loft, living room, dining room, and kitchen have cat5e that are home runned back to garage.  A netgear gs108na will be placed there to connect all rooms.

2. the rt-n65u will connect to the comcast modem and act as the router for dhcp.  The aebs will be a AP for wireless and connect to the router.

3. the second gs108na will connect to the router and provide access to my server cabinet.  That has my mac mini server, 2 nas, networked printer, and then extra ports for future expansion. 

4. The aebs provides wireless for all wireless devices such as laptop, smartphones, tablets, and roku 3.

 

If you don't mind the slight lack of configuration, the AEBS is the best wireless router I've come across.

What would you like to do that the AEBS can't do?

 

The aebs is great but it does lack some features that the asus provides.

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I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND you getting a router COMPATIBLE with DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato firmware and having at least ONE USB Port.

DD-WRT is a Linux based firmware in which you can install apps like: BitTorrent client (yes torrents are downloaded straight to your router's HDD which is attached to your router's USB port), AdBlock, Wake on LAN via WAN, NAS/FTP HDD Server etc.

 

The above are found only on expensive routers with official firmware.

Luckily though the mentioned firmwares provide these features for free on low-end routers.

 

More information here:

http://dd-wrt.com/site/index

http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato

https://openwrt.org/

 

And yes, I too recommend you getting an ASUS router which most ASUS routers are compatible with these firmwares.

 

Check the router you want if it is compatible with dd-wrt here:

http://dd-wrt.com/site/support/router-database

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"The aebs is great but it does lack some features that the asus provides."

Like what - you have not mentioned 1 feature that you would like to have as of yet. And I 2nd whatever it is you buy, I wouldn't even look at it without 3rd party firmware support.

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I was waiting for BudMan to suggest PFSense. He's right. Personally I like IPCop better. But yeah get yourself a low power PC and look at one of the many Linux Firewall Distros then maybe just buy a Wireless AP. 

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if he would actually mention a feature that would require moving to that sort of setup - then sure I would suggest it ;)  IPcop works too - use to run it, notice they have been putting out some updates recent. 

 

But other than making blanket statements that asus has more features than his apple - have no clue to what he is looking for.  Features your not going to use while nice for possible future, which is why you have 3rd party support in whatever device you buy. Make little sense to change for.

 

It seems like a very simple question - what is it that your current router does not do, that you want to do??  From that we can drive for options that can do that - or discuss if spending money to do that even makes sense, etc. etc.

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Look at the UBNT EdgeRouter lite although not sure what the price is on that side of the pond

 

EdgeOS was forked from Vyatta and the ERL itself is a fairly powerful little platform particularly as most things now work with the hardware acceleration (Traffic shaping still doesn't though)

 

With the acceleration working it will do a Gig without it will do about 200 - 300Mbit/s

 

It also has crypto acceleration which I think gets around 150Mbit/s over an IPSEC tunnel, I've had it max out my 80Mbit/s downstream over an IPSEC tunnel with AES-256.

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^ that is actually a good suggestion.  And under his $100 budget

 

http://www.amazon.com/EdgeRouter-ERLite-3-512MB-Ethernet-Router/dp/B00CPRVF5K

 

http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax#edge-router-lite

 

I am really falling in love with my UAP-AC, just wish I had a bigger house so I could deploy more of them ;)

 

I would suggest grab the userguide and take a look see! http://dl.ubnt.com/guides/edgemax/EdgeOS_UG.pdf

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Yeah the exchange rates don't always apply to tech pricing..  So show it at $85, here - you would think with exchange rate it would only be about ?50

 

But let me guess its more than that ;)

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Yeah the exchange rates don't always apply to tech pricing..  So show it at $85, here - you would think with exchange rate it would only be about ?50

 

But let me guess its more than that ;)

 

?85 including Tax, Still a very nice bit of kit.

 

I used to run 2 although I did replace one with a commercial firewall appliance (Server Co-lo, wanted something in-front of the server that was covered by a support agreement)

 

EdgeOS 1.5 has also just been released which adds PPPoE to the gui making it a lot easier to configure for the majority of standard internet connections. (PPP is still used a lot over here for residential/SMB connections.)

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Well can get it here for $85, no tax (amazon) and no shipping..  So they make a killing on selling them there vs here..  Makes no sense!

 

Since the OS is pretty much just linux based (debian) - its like running a firewall/router distro on dedicated hardware is all.  Its a win win!!  I would clearly go with one of these if I ever wanted to go with dedicated router vs my VM currently.

 

http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax#EdgeMAXsoftware

Open Platform

The EdgeOS platform is not just a router operating system. It is also an open platform based on the Debian? Linux distribution. You have complete system-level access including the whole filesystem hierarchy, real shell, root user, etc. Existing Debian? packages can be installed on the system, and you can even build your own packages using standard tools.

I have even seen some chatter about pfsense running on that hardware ;)

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With everyone going off on their tangents let's not.

 

The asus firmware is based on dd-wrt and is easily flashed to the lasted available version if I choose to.  Now then, amazon had a great deal this morning on the netgear gs108na switches for $15 so I picked up 2 of them.  I should have them in a couple of days.

 

I don't want to setup a separate pc or vm and run pfsense...have no need for that.  The asus router does everything I am looking for.  So, when I have the new asus setup, I will post screenshots between that and the aebs and show the differences and what I was looking for.

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With everyone going off on their tangents let's not.

 

The asus firmware is based on dd-wrt and is easily flashed to the lasted available version if I choose to.  Now then, amazon had a great deal this morning on the netgear gs108na switches for $15 so I picked up 2 of them.  I should have them in a couple of days.

 

I don't want to setup a separate pc or vm and run pfsense...have no need for that.  The asus router does everything I am looking for.  So, when I have the new asus setup, I will post screenshots between that and the aebs and show the differences and what I was looking for.

 

Why post screenshots of differences? Its simple to list our what features you want. BudMan's right. You can't upgrade not knowing what features your missing. Your not helping us help you either by not telling us what features you need. Your just saying "this isn't doing the job but I know this will because it has the features i want" and then not saying anything.

 

I hope your right that there's features you need that don't exist on the AEBS, but if you mention them and they all exist, then you just wasted a bunch of money thinking you needed something new.

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"I don't want to setup a separate pc or vm and run pfsense...have no need for that."

Nobody suggested anything of the sort..

So you post asking for what router you should buy.. And then next thing you know you already buying it without anyone saying really anything about it.. You better relook into dd-wrt, while yes the 66U is supported. The 65U doesn't seem to be - doesn't show up on their supported devices wiki or database

Waiting with baited breath on all these features you needed that are not on your apple ;)

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