Looking for a budget router for a home (3 floors, 3000sq feet, 11 devices), because my current router is utter garbage

(bad range and doesnt support nat loopback, which makes me have to mess with dns far more than necesary, and all the messing around gets wiped out when the router restarts or unplugs itself and my computer caches the external dns server, i hate it so much please i need to get rid of it)

edit: it only has to cover maybe 1500sq feet, not 3000

  • It needs to be suitable for a small homelab. (ie: 4 ethernet ports and a functional webui)
  • preferably supports openwrt or some other open-source software, and i - would prefer to spend less than 70 CAD.
  • Wifi 6 is uneccesary as most devices in the house dont support it.

Thank you in advance!

  • moxEnglish
    5•9 months ago

    EdgeRouter X

    More info on that model:

    • Supports hairpin NAT
    • WAN throughput limit is nearly 1Gbps (outbound + inbound combined) when not using CPU-heavy features like advanced buffer management or VPN
    • Stock OS is a Vyatta variant (Debian-based)
    • Has an OpenWRT port, which might be useful if Ubiquiti ever stops updating the stock OS
    • @abhibeckertEnglish
      2•9 months ago

      WAN throughput limit is nearly 1Gbps

      In my experience, exactly 1Gbps. It has 1Gbps network ports, and it maintains that throughput even with “advanced buffer management” / etc enabled.

      I’m sure it slows own if you have thousands of people using it, but OP isn’t planning to do that and anyone who is should buy one with more than four LAN ports anyway. This is a $60 router. If you’re working with thousands of people, you should spend more than that.

      • moxEnglish
        1•9 months ago

        It slows down when using CPU-heavy features, even with a single user, because the CPU isn’t very fast. You can find multiple confirmations of this if you read through the community forum posts from the first couple years after it was released.

        This doesn’t matter for things that can be offloaded, though, like basic routing and NAT. To be clear, it is an excellent value.

        • r00ty
          1•8 months ago

          It’ll likely be like most routers I’ve seen. If hardware offloading is possible it’ll have cpu to spare at 1gbps. If it isn’t (mostly qos or other packet marking processes), then the cpu will get maxed and thruput drops.