Good morning all, I am looking for a cheapish router for my setup please.
I have Starlink internet and achieve around 120-220Mbps download. I have a Ubiquity U6 LR and a U5 LR AP both running Ubiquity OS hardwired to a Edge8x switch. The starlink is doing all the routing / DHCP tasks.
I have 30 connected devices currently. I only use the Ubiquity wifi, not the Starlink, and I am considering adding another U5 in Mesh.
I am looking at putting the Starlink in to Modem only mode and putting a openWRT router in to handle all the complex stuff. The open WRT router wont be carrying out any Wifi related duties.
I play online games and I stream 4k content from my plex server so bandwidth has to be as high as possible for the 30 devices.we will often have 2 devices streaming your tube, 1 on Netflix and 1 streaming 4K from a local Plex server.
I am based in the UK sadly or i would have had that. I dont want to spend a huge amount of money as most oif the expensive kit is based on AX stuff, as i dont need any of that the SimpleWAN might be perfect. I will look on UK ebay
just had a thought, I have an Edgeswitch 8xp (ubiquity) and its showing as a supported device! it sis pretty weak in the specs [OpenWrt Wiki] Techdata: Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch 8XP (ES-8XP) but it performs well as a switch using the inbuilt firmware. how would this perform as a router? also would it be able to do the 48v POE that it does natively?
It's second generation ath79 (AR7242) running at 400 MHz, no need to test that for routing 100-220 MBit/s, it will drop out somewhere around 70-100 MBit/s.
What about something like a NanoPi R2S paired with your existing managed switch?
Definitely add the $10 metal case so it doesn't over heat (the R2S needs it). Gigabit routing, and should also handle tasks like 220 Mbps SQM with plenty of CPU room to spare. It's looking like OpenWrt will soon support hardware accelerated crypto on this SoC, which would be a nice touch for OpenVPN if you have any plans to use that.
I use the NanoPi R4S and a AC-Lite for my wifi. Its good for upto about 900mbps according to testing.
Got the 4gb variant and metal case and that means i can self host the ubiquiti network controller via docker on it. makes it a nice all in one. Does take about a month or so shipping however.
I'd hope you have hardwired Lan backbones for your wifi?
This is definitely a better option than the R2S if you can stand increasing budget just a bit more. The R4S 4GB will give you even more future proofing.
Full disclose, while an R2S would have handled SQM for my current ~450 Mbps ISP service fine, I picked an R4S for my own recent gateway router upgrade to be ready for Gigabit someday. Other than being tremendously under utilized at the moment (and really, what's wrong with that?), it truly is a great device.
Assuming a NanoPi R2S with metal case will cost you around £60, I'd take it over any of those options if budget is a high priority. There is a lot of distance between the ipq40xx and MT7621 devices you've listed and the four 64 bit ARM A53 cores in the NanoPi R2S. The only downside I can think of to the R2S is its sole USB 2 port (no USB3) if that is important to you.
Going for performance (and two USB 3 ports), I think £90 for a NanoPi R4S is preferable to the WRT32X for £99. If you did not already have a managed switch, maybe, but I think I'd still get the R4S and save up for a used switch. I don't see anything about the dual core WRT32X with 512 MB of memory that I like better than the 6 cores and 4 GB of DDR4 memory in the R4S.
Reading his exploits gave me my original start on All in ones vs proper enterprise planning.
I was trying to move away from an all in one solution. I previously had a OpenWrt flashed Bt Hub 5. But honestly its wifi was crap. So i bought a Ubiquiti AC-Lite and there was just a night and day difference. I have VDSL at present but fibre is being laid in my area so i wanted something that would be able to do a 1gb fibre connection. I was trying to get a ubiquiti switch but they are going for silly prices so i just picked up a cheap TPLink 1gb switch for now with the aim of getting a POE switch so it can power my wifi point and incase i add a 2nd. Currently I'm using a POE injector but it adds clutter in my cupboard and making it run from a POE switch would be far neater.
So once you are at this point, you basically have an enterprise level setup. smaller but still individual bits of kit. This makes it far easier to swap and replace gear if it dies. or even upgrade to 2.5G or 5G backbone internally for backups/4k streaming. You have also segmented your load better. The switch and router now divide load between them. Now i just needed a better router. (the hub5 only has 128mb of ram and i was using adguardhome which was causing some out of memory issues, but it made advert blocking so easy) So i started hunting around for some. I started looking at x86 kit but i used to run an old desktop for a firewall and it was noisy. I wanted something small but powerful and not noisy.
That lead me to the Nano Pi series. i debated the R2S but then they released the R4S. It ticked all the boxes i want and i started to hunt one down.
In summary, I have a silent router/switch/wifi combo that can sit in the living room and not annoy me with fans whirring. If you ever have managed a full enterprise setup the fans will drive you nuts. Theres a good reason why network cupboards have acoustic foam
The other point which i utterly forgot in my write up? Ease of use.
R4S uses a sdcard. You dont have to crack the case and solder in wires to reflash it. just drop a image on the sdcard and go. While i can open a router and solder and reflash via UART its a pain and the ease of just flash and go was another tick in the box. It is designed to be opensource friendly and resuable. Unlike many all in one home routers. There is no closed source issues (Broadcom i'm looking at you).
I've dropped my home server for a little raspberry pi. It was through playing with that and discovering i could essentially replace my old x86 box with a semi silent (it has a little fan on it) pi that lead me to further investigations with routers. i did try the pi as a router but honestly it sucks ass at it. you really NEED dual 1gb ports and at least 2gb of ram. so i set that as my minimum requirements.
The guy i previously quoted on the R4S thread uses his to monitor his cameras and do motion detection.
FriendlyElec also just released the R5S. It shouldnt take much to port that once the upstream work has been done.
Dual 2.5gb Lan ports and a 1gb WAN. Its a shame they cut the ram from 4gb on the r4s to 2gb on the r5s but i guess supply shortages are an issue.
I would ask what do you want to accomplish in the end or what doesn't the Starlink box do? There's little to no point in adding more hardware just because.
