Hello there. Total newb here. I’m looking a new router. I currently have spectrums internet base plan, 200down and 10up. I live in the US. I got a budget of a 100$.
My currently Netgear R6400 router shows inconsistent speeds when I run test on my iPhone. I also lag quite a bit, there’s about 10 devices connected at ounce most of the time, 2 of them being PS4’s.
Looking up routers for gaming is what pretty much lead me here. I found out openwrt has something called SQM, which from what I read is the next gen of QoS and also there’s a lot of customization in openwrt.
I came across one router called the IQRouter but have read that’s it’s just a tp link archer C7 router with SQM being the main feature. So I was thinking about just getting a archer C7 instead and putting openwrt myself.
Not too sure if there’s a better router out there within my budget that openwrt supports. Any recommendations would be awesome.
So the IQrouter is based on OpenWrt, and sqm, but they added a lot of bells and whistles on top, like automated speedtests to adaptively set the traffic shaper to follow the available bandwidth and update notifications. Great product if you want a no hassle home-router that just works.
I am not sure though whether an C7 will allow traffic-shaping at you 200/10 Mbps plan, but I am sure others on this forum will know from 1st hand experience.
I'm on the same Spectrum plan (200/10) and my Linksys Wrt1200 v1 runs great on it, get my contracted speeds consistently with no problem, but, I've never been happy with sqm on it, with down/up set at 95% my down speeds get stuck at around 120 no matter what settings I use. I really don't know that much about sqm and that may be normal, or a cpu limitation, I think @moeller0 may be able to explain better, having said all that I'm happy with it otherwise and you should be able to find a used one for $80-90.