Hi all, I’m looking to upgrade my router from the default one that came from my ISP.
I don’t need anything super fancy, just something with 4+ lan ports (1gbps is ok, 2.5gbps would be nicer), 1 WAN Port, Wifi-6 (802.11ax), and the ability to have an isolated IoT network (using a vlan for this would be nice).
Any suggestions? I’d like to keep the price down if possible. This is just for my home network.
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I use OPNsense on a reasonably cheap mini-PC with 6 ethernet ports that I bought from AliExpress. You can do a lot with OPNsense. For wifi I could have added a wireless card, but to avoid any potential driver issues instead I just plug in a wireless router set to Access Point mode.
How much this kind of setup costs depends on what kind of hardware you buy. If you stick to the minimum spec for OPNsense and buy a cheap wifi card or a used wifi router from eBay, you won’t need to spend too much.
You’re in selfhosted, so most people here are going to suggest you self host something like pfsense or opnsense, which would give you everything you need, but you know being self hosted you’re going to have a steep learning curve.
Otherwise go pick up any router at best buy, they’re all assorted levels of garbage.
Could always whitebox it with Debian, nftables, dnsmasq, hostapd, etc. on an old mini PC if it has two NICs…
Or run x86 OpenWRT of you want a nice UI. Works wonderfully. It lacks A/B boot but it’s fairly easy to implement on your own
How much wifi and open-source do you really want?
If you are willing to go with commercial hardware + open source firmware (OpenWRT) you might want to check the table of hardware of OpenWrt at https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi and https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_864_ac-wifi. One solid pick for the future might be the Netgear WAX2* line. One of those models is now fully supported the others are on the way. If you don’t mind having older wifi a Netgear R7800 is solid.
If you want full open-source hardware and software you need a more exotic brand like this https://www.banana-pi.org/en/bananapi-router/.
Both solutions will lead to OpenWRT when it comes to software, it is better than any commercial firmware but there’s a catch about open-source wifi. The best performing wifi chips are Broadcom and those don’t usually see open-source software support**. MediaTek is the open-source alternative and while they work fine they can’t, unfortunately, beat Broadcom. As most hardware is Broadcom they have hacks that go behind the published wifi standards and get it go a few megabytes/second faster and/or improve the range a bit.
** DD-WRT is another “open-source” firmware that has a specific agreement with Broadcom to allow them to use their proprietary drivers and distribute them as blob with their firmware. While it works don’t expect compatibility with newer hardware nor a bug free solution like OpenWRT is.
Furthermore depending on your ISP you might be able to simply add a small ARM box attached to it and use ir for DHCP, VPN, DNS resolver etc. and you could still use the ISP router as gateway / firewall / switch / wifi.
