I’m gonna be moving into a new place soon and I’ll be setting up the Internet there. I want to experiment with setting up a local network with static IPs just for learning and fun, so I want my own router. I don’t want something hard to use because other people will be using the internet from it too. I don’t really know what the router market looks like, and I don’t want to support Reddit, so I’m asking here.
Ideally, this router would:
- Be under $150 (but I might be willing to go a bit higher)
- Be easily purchasable (no AliExpress specials)
- Not sell data to corporations
- Have a long life, ideally through easily set-up open source firmware but reputable proprietary is fine
- Have good enough antennas to propagate signal across a small house
- Support up to 500Mb/s sustained speeds
What do you think? Thank you for your help!
Check routers at a pawn shops and see which ones can run openwrt.
I have a 10GbE switch and haven’t hit 500Mb/s. Network capacity likely won’t be your bottleneck.
edit: ok, we’re probably both making the same mistake here, 500Mb/s isn’t even saturating a gigabit nic, you likely mean 500MB/s
Did you know openwrt makes their own router now. It’s called the openwrt one. They’re not had for the price, mines been pretty solid. And they have a bunch upgrade options.
No, I mean 500Mb/s, as my Internet will be 300Mb/s. My needs are not great.
I generally overshoot when it comes to the hardware specs, if I can. That way you’re prepared in advance if you end up having the option to upgrade your Internet connection.
Otherwise, you may find yourself locked in to the slower plan due to the cost of upgrading your hardware.
But, sometimes you have to choose realistic over optimal, of course. So in other words, I do not think I know what’s best for you! Just offering a perspective that has worked for me, in case it helps you in some way as you evaluate the choice that’s best for you.
Almost all routers can handle gigabit, which is almost certainly what you want if you plan on doing local networking. A typical hard drive has speeds of about a gigabit. There is no reason to get anything slower. You can also get some gigabit switches (or even faster if you are using nvme on both machines) and connect two machines that need fast speeds between them to it. Most switches will be able to send packets to each other without going through the router.
If you really want to do some learning you could try to set up an opnsense box on an old PC and connect that to a switch. It’s feature rich and completely modular and upgradable. This is probably the best thing you could do if you want to learn something but also the worst thing to do if you want consistent uptime since you can pretty easily break stuff if you don’t read the docs.
That said, as others have mentioned openwrt on a used router is probably the best of both worlds - feature rich but less breakable.
didn’t know you could still get a dial up plan.
j/k, but damn I’m so sorry, it should be illegal to call VDSL broadband.