Hi folks! I am about to upgrade my Comcast to 1Gbps. I am mostly interested in getting a wired edge router to take advantage of this higher speed. I'm not the first to ask here, but it seems like the number of people making this upgrade is growing at a fast clip, so there is value in keeping these recommendations fresh.
With more and more households getting Comcast 1 Gbps, what is the current advice? I don't need wireless, as I have ethernet directly wired from my current edge router to my 3 APs. I don't intend on using resources on OpenVPN and/or TOR, although I will use WireGuard as VPN while traveling.
I am pretty knowledgeable in networking concepts, but don't want to spend days searching for NIC drivers or dialing in various traffic shaping suggestions. As I have a limited amount of time (but not zero), I am willing to pay into the $300s, as long as that is what a single home (with 4 users' worth of devices) needs for things to run smoothly. That said, no one who posts or reads OpenWRT isn't looking for a way to use knowledge to save money on hardware.
I am quite familiar with OpenWRT, and would happily run that on some new hardware, as long as there were some "Good Known Settings" for 1 Gbps Comcast.
I am also aware of pfsense, but have never used it.
I am also reading through previous related threads. Many thanks.
Well, it depends on how much you want to "tinker" and what kind of funtionality you're looking for. x86 and pfsense is a solid choice and offers you more functionality overall with litte work however it does target more powerful devices than OpenWrt. That being said, you need quite powerful hardware to handle gigabit linerate anyway so. There are few "routers" that will handle linerate, you're basically looking at the higher end of ARM/ARM64 ones and in terms of price/performance ratio you're usually better off getting a x86/SBC (RK3399 with an addtional NIC either via PCIe or integrated). If you can get your hands a little bit dirty FreeBSD 13-CURRENT with RockPro64 and dual port Intel NICs works well and offers quite a bit of flexibility however you need to either run your own package repo or do selfhosting (the latter works fine it just takes some time depending on software) as it's "WIP". Depending on support in OpenWrt you might have to wait for kernel 5.10 to hit the tree (I haven't actually tried running OpenWrt using that setup). Another option would getting a Edgerouter (MIPS64 variants) or similar which can hit linespeed however you'll need to use hardware acceleration (ie vendor firmware) which comes with its own limitations and MIPS64 is pretty much dead in general by now. You can use something RPi4 but the hardware isn't well suited for networking and lacks features such as hardware crypto. There are variants that break out the 1x PCIe slot but it gets expensive fast and RK3399-platforms are more suitable in that regard.
As for switch, get a managed one. You wont regret it later on if you even once need to troubleshoot even if its only once and VLAN functionality can be handy. Zyxel GS19XX series are solid ones and not very expensive, you can go cheaper but it's a bit of "you get what you pay for".