I know there are many threads like this, but given that black friday comes up I thought we could create a new thread with recommendation from everyone.
So I would like to know what is the best router to get on black friday in 2020, what are you looking for ?
Personally I'm looking for new features like MU-MIMO, WiFi6 etc.
forget about that , just look for wifi 5 if you need it right now!
Separate the router from the AP. Get a Wi-Fi6 AP and a capable OpenWRT router that can support multi-gigabit.
Look into Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module with IO Board to take you up to 4 Gbps bidirectional throughput (2 Gbps i unidirectionally) with a dual 2.5 Gbps PCI x1 adapter.
Only problem is no one has made a case to put it in yet.
and what device would that be?
Uhm, well, OK. In my opinion you are stretching "multi-gigabit here". Only marketing folks count "bidirectional" as double throughput, so let's forget about that. We do not say that there are 4 ports with 2 Gbps birectional throuput when we see a device with 4 gigabit ports.
So that's either a single 2Gbps port or two 1 Gbps ports. Which really isn't that impressive. Sure you can probably route 1 Gbps between two ports, but still. It's not much more multi-gigabit than any modern SoC with a switch.
No, you can have two 2.5 Gbps on one PCIe 1x card. So, you can have up to 2.5 Gbps of unidirectional Ethernet throughput (LAN-to-WAN or WAN-to-LAN) as long as the load in the opposite direction is asymmetric. If the load in both directions is symmetric, you can have up to 2 Gbps of unidirectional throughput in each direction.
The bottom line is that you can have a maximum of 4 Gbps of combined bidirectional (LAN-to-WAN and WAN-to-LAN) throughput because the PCIe 1x bus maxes out at 4Gbps in each direction (from the PCIe card to the CPU and vice versa). With two 2.5 Gbps interfaces in the same PCIe 1x bus, the maximum combined bidirectional throughput is 4Gbps. This is not a marketing gimmick but rather the nature of the PCIe 1x bus throughput limitation.