Advice needed: Ubiquity EdgeRouter X as routing only, no wifi, gigabit+vlan router?

Hi all,
I am selecting a device to replace my old WRT54GS router that I use at home with no wifi (it sits in the basement in a rack and I have an AP for wifi on ground floor). I need 4 gigabit ports to upgrade the whole network + 1 wan port (not necessarily gigabit) and vlan support.

After looking at Linksys new routers (WRT1200AC mostly) and regretting that the wifi would be unused and all that hard earned cash would be misspent, I finally stumbled upon the Ubiquity EdgeRouter X.

At less than half the price of the Linksys router it seems to deliver all I need in a carrier grade package: am I missing something or is this a dream come true?

Has anyone experience of flashing Ubiquity EdgeRouter X with LEDE/OpenWRT? Does it perform well? Is it worth the price?

Any other cheap and reliable router only hardware for LEDE/OpenWRT?

Thanx in advance for your advice and suggestions.

Paolo

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The performance of the Edge Router models comes from special kernel modules in the firmware / hardware offloading.

If you flash them with LEDE / OpenWRT that feature is pretty much gone and then their performance is quite mediocre (500MHz to 1GHz dual core MIPS CPUs, depending on model) compared to newer routers from Linksys or Netgear (utilizing 1Ghz+ dual core ARM CPUs). But they are also more expensive than the small Edge Router models.

So if you get an Edge Router model I suggesst you keep their original firmware. It is not your usual consumer router firmware and should still be supported properly by Ubiquity.

Another thing to note: Depending on how you configure the Edge Router offloading might also get disabled on the stock firmware and then you might end up with mediocre performance there too.

I have several Edgerouter ER-X in Production and i cannot find any performance-limitations.
With FastPath enabled, you can easily get 1GBit NAT-Performance.

Instructions for Flashing: Sector5

If you need an Image with enabled FastPath, let me know.

I'd like to try that image with fast path.

Here: Edgerouter ER-X

I hope you have read the Flasing-Instructions above :wink:

Yeah flashing won't be a problem, have already had LEDE on it before :slight_smile:

Perfect!

Tell us your experience :wink:

Well you weren't exaggerating. 1GB NAT confirmed. :star_struck:

Also did some flent tests with Cake enabled on the eth0.1 and eth0.2 ingress. Seems to max out right about 570Mbit total (up+down).
My tests on stock Ubiquiti firmware maxed out at around 220Mbit total.

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Sounds good. So now we know that the Edgerouter ER-X with LEDE & FastPath is fast enough.

BTW, you can play a little bit with irqbalance -> Multicore-Supportthread MT7621

Hi,

is there any chance, I can get my hands on the firmware too? It’s been taken offline..

Thanks,
Don

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Hi guenti_r. Any chance you can share the LEDE/OpenWRT firmware for ER-X with FastPath enabled? I need good VLAN support so do you happen to have such a version of 18.06? It seems like the old link expired.

Thanks for any help!!

Mark

The 18.06 branch and master branch no longer require fastpath, because software flow offloading is built-in by default. You can enable this in Luci's firewall section.

As a matter of fact, ER-X is a mt7621 based device, and hence you can even enable the hardware flow offloading option in the same firewall section. That will give you hardware based NAT and gigabit speeds at 0-5% CPU utilization :slight_smile:

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Can the mt7621 support VLANs? I saw a note in a wiki page that this was not supported for mt7621A at least, and that was about the only thing holding me back now that I know Fastpath is built in.

That's awesome. Thank you!

Yes, it has the same SOC as the dir-860l I am using, and I am using VLANs just fine. The old 17.01 branch does have some bugs with VLANs, which require a hacky workaround. Stick with the 18.06RC1 release for now :slight_smile: