I would like to buy some new hardware for my home network but need full support for 1Gbps.
My ISP will provide 500Mbps to my apartment and I would like to make use of it, not to stuck at 100-200Mbps.
I have Netgear WNR3500 L2 with Tomato but Broadcom chip is a crap and this router with Tomato is not giving me full support for 1Gbps ports in LAN. Even with bcm_nat loaded.
I would like to buy new hardware and use LEDE. I was thinhing about TP-Link Archer C7 but saw on this forum that this HW also does not support 1Gbps.
What kind of hardware do you recommend? I would like to have 4 LAN 1Gbps ports, 1 WAN 1Gbps port, WiFi a/c/n
USB is nice to have.
Hope you can help me.
LAN to LAN is 1gbps for sure. Wan to LAN is about 450-500 without hw Nat which is marginally meet your requirements.
Or you use community build with hw nat enabled, 700-800.
For gigabit I moved to a small intel server. These days it looks to me like https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0741F634J would be the thing to get, with 4Gig RAM and a small flash drive, it'd be a monster router and firewall. Then you can just use wifi access points inside the firewall rather than full routers. Something like one of the Mikrotik devices.
Of course cost of all this setup is much higher than an Archer C7, the temptation is to use the server for more stuff like file serving or a NextCloud install or something. I'm not sure that's the safest way to go, but it's common enough.
Other thoughts, If you have one of the modern ISPs and can enable ipv6 much of your traffic won't need NAT and your internal network becomes much easier to administer. TAYGA is your friend for NAT64 and Google offers DNS64 on their public DNS, I can confirm that this works really well, way better than the typical NAT stuff.
I do not want to play with x86, external wifi cards, usb to ethernet etc.
Would like to buy one of the existing routers and change firmware to LEDE, that's all. LEDE has everything that I need.
Years ago I had router build on Debian. It had firewall, DHCP server, 3 ethernet cards. Ah, good old days.
Now I have wife, kid and cat. Don't have so much time to play with all these things
So the choice is Archer C7 v2. I have to find this version at local stores.
If you have the money, there is nothing like a standard PC with dedicated modem (VDSL2 or SFP, depending or your needs) and WiFi (at these prices, you may as well go for 4x4 MuMIMO Wireless AD) PCIe cards.
If not (like me), try getting a standalone gigabit modem, and connect it to a Xiaomi Mi 3G router, after flashing it with Padavan (if only LEDE were available for the 3 and 3G, then I would switch over our 3 to LEDE).