Looking for Gbit / multi-Gbit router available in the EU

I'm in .se.

The cold country with fast internet, and polar bears roaming the streets (not really, but it still fools people),

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I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, but how would that change things?

Not that it matters right now, I only have 50Mb up.

Lucky you. I think I could get 1Gbps symmetric if I signed up for the business plan instead of the personal one, but AFAIK the price on that wouldn't be worth it. Still, the ISP says they’re expanding to 10Gbit in some places, so I'm looking forward to what the future holds.

I also have a NAS on the network that I wouldn't mind faster local access to, but the SATA drives themselves can't do much over 1Gbps anyway. (Actually now seeing that a realistic speed for a SATA drive is 600Mbps, I'm curious what magic ZFS is doing to get me up to 1Gbps read/write haha.)

I will keep my answer sime:
https://m.nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005003993468819.html?spm=a2g0n.productlist.0.0.bb69cNXscNXsWP&browser_id=2db429bcc93d40c58089a8a2401fe317&aff_trace_key=a9cbeed21fd24c25b380eba05b28a8ad-1658649559519-05518-UneMJZVf&aff_platform=msite&m_page_id=qocigaclij0cav7h1822f381eaf1739eddf9d310ce&gclid=&pdp_npi=2%40dis!EUR!!317.08!!!!!%402103255b16586495843264440e8719!12000027673149423!sea&algo_pvid=2ee3ebc2-d553-41aa-ac67-f3d5e7ab2e62

I hope this works... If not, just go on aliexpress and search for "router pentium n6005". You will find versions with 4 and 6 intel i225 lan ports, multi GB of ram and m2 ssd. Not ferribly expensive, but should be more than capable enough to do what you need.

WRT3200ACM is available on amazon.de and they ship to most EU countries.

Just don't, it's not 250€ good, not today.

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from my point of view the WRT3200ACM is over priced now. on wikidevi they say it was out in 2016 at 249.99$
now in 2022 it is at 249.99€ on Amazon.de !
it doesn't have all the latest technological advances. it only has 1Gbps ports, no wifi 6. Its price should have been greatly reduced. Now we have much better for less.

You can get a NETGEAR WAX206 for 90€.
a few weeks ago, in France, you could buy for 200€ à QHora-301W, with wifi6 and 2x 10Gbps ports (multigig)...

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Note that MBps and Mbps are not the same units: Mbps means "megabits per second" and MBps means "megabytes per second". SATA 3 max speed is 6 Gbps or 600 MBps (wikipedia), whereas in networking speed is almost always specified in Mbps or Gbps. 1 Gbps = 125 MBps.

Uhh... you guys buy electronics from Alibaba? The only thing I ever trusted them with was a rubber duck with a helmet for motorbike handlebars haha.

But seeing that there don't seem to be a lot of all-in-one options that would outpreform the AX50 that I'm running now, I'll probably end up with a mini PC w/ OPNSense like you linked, when I learn more about OPNSense that is.

By the way I think this is a better link to what you meant.

EDIT: It's an AX50 / AX3000, not an AX5000

It's been as low as 145€ new, and 130€ used, on amazon.de, according to CCC .
250€ is def a no go.

Oh, I never thought to check with them, they do indeed ship here. The shipping cost would be more than what I'm used to though.

Yeah, the AX50 I have goes for about 80€ and it has wifi6. Not that good of an upgrade haha.

That one seems to be exactly the same as the AX50, the only difference beinf WPA3 support.

Now THAT'S what I'm talking about! That one also actually seems to be available locally to me on-order. I can't find any info about whether it can run a VPN server, but surely that would be fixed with OpenWRT. If I could have that but with more 10gig ports, I'd be over the moon.

Oh. It was late at night when I wrote that haha, thanks for pointing that out. Now I actually have a justification for going with 10gbps.

The QHora-301W is still WiP , see here : Adding OpenWrt support for QNAP QHora-301W

Thanks for the heads up. Do you think it's going to receive good support once it's done?

Fully right. I dont like this either... But regardless of what you buy, 99% chance its built in china. I bought the "old" version with the celeron j3160. An xsk branded NUC. I flashed the open source bios (coreboot) from protectli, which cost 2x the price. So if you can give me a reason to pay double, for the same hardware??? It now says its a protectli box :wink:
Edit: Ow, also: i dont trust the memory and harddisks, so i would buy them separately. It is running without any issues, but i have to admit, i ran tcpdump on my router for a few months with nothing behind it to be sure there are no backdoors. (If there were, i guess they would have been in the bios)

Okay, so seeing that there really aren't many devices to choose from, a better question I think I should ask is

Is OpenWRT right for my setup?

I originally wanted to go with OpenWRT because it always comes up as the best solution for all-in-one devices and I didn't want to introduce too much complexity to my network (and I wanted to never use proprietary router firmware again). I only learned from this thread that OpenWRT is aimed at lower performance devices (thank you @diizzy) and that not that many devices support >>1Gbit speeds and/or WiFi 6, whether they are supported by OpenWRT or not.

So far, the only option suggested that had 10Gbit ports was the QNAP QHora-301W, and that's not supported by OpenWRT so far (thank you @shdf). The only other option I found by myself was the Zyxel NBG7815 (5x 10Gbit ports!) but that one isn't supported by OpenWRT either.

So, right now I'm flirting with the idea of getting an x86-64 mini PC and running OPNSense (which came up better than PFSense in my research), which I also only learned about from this thread, thank you again @diizzy. Some people seem to say that setting it up is somehow more difficult than OpenWRT, but I looked at some tutorials and there was very little that I wasn't familiar with already. It would come at a cost of higher complexity of an extra switch and access point, but in the end, I'd still be managing the same services one way or another. I'd just have to remember to be on the lookout for BIOS upgrades for the PC.

However, the number of options for mini PCs with integrated >>1Gbit support is still not very large. I like the Protectli lineup, but they only seem to have one device capable of 2.5G, and it doesn't come cheap (over double the QHora-301W that has two 10G ports). So I'd probably have to get an expandable PC to put in a 10Gbit networking card, which, for two ports, would still run me about the price of the QHora itself.

In conclusion, I really have no idea of what I should even be looking for. Please help.

Oh, I like paying less for sure, but Ali is a place where I wouldn't ever bet on receiving the actual listed hardware.

Also this. One big reason I'm getting a new device at all is that the one I have has been exposed for sending my data to a third party. I don't want to run any risks on a piece of HW that has access to all of my network traffic.

Fyi, i run proxmox on mine (it says pfsense/opnsense, but it works well on all linux/unix flavours). In a VM, i run an openwrt and an opnsense. Opnsense gives some network issues that i cant seem to figure out. Ooenwrt works like a charm!
I also run a bunch of other containers, contexts and VMs, but thats out of scope for this chat (and is explained in another topic on this forum)

Edit: important for me, was passive cooling/no moving parts and a low tdp cpu, with ample power to run openwrt

with 2 x 10Gbit ports there is also the Asus GT-AXE16000 :sweat_smile: but it will never be supported by openwrt.

That's a strange conclusion to draw :slightly_smiling_face:. The better conclusion would be you need beefier hardware to compensate for vendor specific proprietary hardware acceleration etc.

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The correct conclusion would be Linux, not
Openwrt, since the 2nd only supports what the 1st provides.