Do you have a specific need for that much bandwidth (eg regularly uploading large videos) or are you assuming it will make gaming better? Also what is the upload speed on that plan (I presume the "2gig" only refers to download bandwidth).
As per other comments: gaming is about latency (ping) and latency stability (sqm can help here, especially when other people are using the same internet link). Even a few megabits per second is enough for almost all online games, thousands of megabits per second is complete overkill (and often more than the raw link the servers have).
If you absolutely need 2 gigabits per second
Option 1: A router that can handle a 2GBPS+ link and run SQM at the same time. ie a standard desktop x86 computer with a add-in multi-gigabit network card OR a motherboard with a multi-gigabit NIC. Add the cost of a separate wireless access point. Costs anything from "almost free" (old computers + buy a NIC) to most of a thousand dollars (everything new and higher spec).
Option 2: Don't worry about SQM and instead rely on the fact you won't ever actually use all of the bandwidth you are paying for. Look for an OpenWRT supported router than has a multi-gigabit interface and read up whether or not it actually can do that rate without "hardware offloading" (something that you often can't use anyway). Many hundreds of dollars minimum, possibly up to a thousand dollars.
Knowing what I now know: I'd lean towards option 1. It's not always an option space-wise and you don't want to use any hardware made before 2011 (high power draw), but the hardware is standardised so in the long term you can easily replace parts.
Be wary that many box-label specs are based off "theoretical" numbers for just the ethernet transciever IC, not the system as a whole. Not to mention the big unknown of how much processing you apply (firewall rules, sqm, NAT, etc) which can take this down to approx hundreds of Mbit/s, depending on many factors.
The MOGINSOK thing looks bat ugly but I suspect it will probably meet most of its stated spec.
Its big passive heatsinking makes me really want to see its power draw specs (idle watts, full load watts) and see if they're that different from a desktop PC or fat laptop. (Random guess: 25W idle 100W full load?)
At that price you may as well start considering actual, standard x86 desktop computers. That way you can replace parts when things break. Also if you use a second hand (eg Haswell SFF) computer then you might even be able to set things up cheaper.
For both of these options you will need to purchase separate Wifi APs. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it might be (?) cheaper in the long term, and it frees you from necessarily needing the Wifi APs to also run OpenWRT. I of course put OpenWRT on mine but I also don't need high-end AX expensive APs, which you guys might want if you're not wired ethernet people (and want something resembling hundreds of megabits of throughput).
On that note... it's very unlikely you will get even 1Gbit/s over wifi if you're more than a meter or two away from your wireless APs AND they have to be expensive ones. I regularly only get a few Mbit/s from mine, but I'm in a high interference environment.
Reading through everything, it seems like we might be fine with 1 Gbps up/down. I think it's a bit out of our budget to get a whole new x86_64 computer just for a router. What hardware should we be looking at that'll be fine with 3-5 Ethernet connected decides + wireless devices?
Even 1Gbit/s is hard to saturate with non-x86 hardware, unless you pay quite a bit. Some off the shelf SOHO routers that cost hundreds of dollars can do it with hardware offloading and absolutely no special features enabled, but if you're on this forum then I assume you want special features.
TL;DR: if your budget is less than a few hundred dollars then you either have to live with problems (no SQM, cheap hardware, can't saturate the full 1Gbit, no OpenWRT, etc) or you have to downgrade your expectations.
Consider plugging things into a Gigabit switch. That way you can have as many ethernet connected devices and wireless APs as you want. An 8 port switch will be cheaper than everything else here.
In my country (Australia) most ISPs let you upgrade your plans for free but won't let you downgrade. I assume it's the same for you in the US?
It might be worth going for a cheaper plan and cheaper equipment to start with, give everyone a feel of what it's like. Measure speeds & latency both wired and wireless whilst there are other users. That will give you an idea of whether or not you need to invest more of your limited budget in the Wifi AP side or the raw router side. If the bottleneck is the wireless side then it's generally better to use a few (eg 2) wireless APs rather than one very big expensive one, but again read into the Duckware link I provided above.
Whilst I'm here: apologies for my general pessimism. Hopefully you'll find a cheaper or better option than what I'm saying. Despite my long ramblings I am not a reliable expert.
I come from Australia, where 1000Mbit down 50Mbit up costs $150AUD (~107USD) a month and is only available if you live in a lucky area or pay thousands+ for an install. I use an x86 router and two wireless APs to try and eke out as much value from my 25/5Mbit (!) line as I can. It's cheaper than paying for a faster plan but not being able to use it. The household watches lots of video and doesn't complain, but no one has 4K here and I'm the only person that games.
Thank you to everyone from giving their suggestions.
From what I can tell, I should get...
An 8 port switch
An x86_64 machine (do they all support SQM?)
A couple wireless APs
Over here 1Gig up/down is $80 per month and with multiple people gaming/streaming 4K/in Zooms and the possibility of a low to mid usage homelab, a setup above in the $200-400 range should be achievable, right?
you went back to 1g option but also good to check how ISP is offering >1g plan ... as trick can be that 2g is provided via 2 x 1g ports, which is a totally different setup than a real single 2.5/10g port
ok, but you'll receive a fibre modem, the ISP side might be scaled to 5G that's fine, but still the "client service" side can be tricky: they can give a fiber modem with 1 fiber port + 5 x 1Gb ethernet ports and the 5g fibre plan is actually shared across the physical 1g ports; or they can give you a device which indeed has 5g ethernet lan port as the service termination access point ... very-very different setup as latter case you'll need your client devices to have 5g ethernet port also to utilize full capacity. in former case isp might say you can put 5 distinct users all with max 1g ethernet, but all together is 5g traffic.
If you do buy new stuff, the markup for 2.5GBASE-T network cards isn't that much (LAN switches are another topic), so if your ISP is offering 2 GBit/s contracts it doesn't hurt to be prepared. SQM is a software feature, it works on all hardware - but it needs considerable performance for highspeed links (so you do want fast router hardware for your situation, as in non-Atom x86_64).
As it's always easier to upgrade a contract, it does make sense to start out with a 1 GBit/s one and just have your end of the hardware prepared for more. But you need to decide what you want and how much you're willing to pay monthly (if the markup is negligible for 3 persons, why not).
Edit: a single-port 2.5GBASE-T r8125 Realtek card costs between 20-25 EUR (compared to 8-10 EUR for a 1000BASE-T r8168 one), speeds above that (and multi-port cards) drive up the prices quickly.
this would be the best solution, but you can't find it anywhere at the moment.
The mini PC with a N5105 will easily support 2Gb with SQM. in a french forum someone posted some screenshots with ESXI and openwrt runing in a VM in this box :
see here :
hummm, he used SQM only for the upload, because he was having some upside/down between 500/800Mbps. with SQM he could stabilize the upload to 800Mbps.
Later he said :
For fun I did some download tests, I still had about 2100Mbps after several speedtest (without SQM).
I set SQM to limit my download speed to 2030Mbps, I put "2140000" at random and each speedtest was limited to 2030 afterwards.
I can clearly see the CPU impact, I consume 30%! (IDLE 70% during the speedtest).
And it works extremely well (see screenshot).
so we can say that with SQM on a 2Gbps connection we consume about 30% of CPU...And this is in a virtual machine.
In my local testing with iperf3, I hit the cliff (one core at 100%) at 830 MBit/s on my celeron j1900 (Rohde & Schwarz Cybersecurity gateprotect GmbH GP-7543, four Intel I211 1000BASE-T/ igb network cards). Both have the same 2.00 GHz base frequency, while the burst frequency of the n5105 is higher (2.90 GHz) than the 2.42 GHz of the j1900, all performance gains would be down to the process shrinkage and core improvements. While you might be able to convince me that the performance gains made in 7 years of Atom development would have closed the gap for sqm/ cake at 1 GBit/s wirespeed, I find it hard to believe that they are sufficient for 2.0-2.5 GBit/s, at least for comparing apples with apples (sqm/ cake, up-/ and downlink shaping) and not less intensive configurations (codel, only uplink shaping).
but I suspect it will probably meet most of its stated spec.
