Ask HN: What's a good home router? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's a good home router?

24 pointsAuthorizedCust34 comments

I have an Archer A20 3.0, an AC4000 home router. It's abandoned: latest firmware is from October 2019. Feature set is limited and dodgy, and it isn't rock-solid reliable.

I'm having a lot of trouble wading through options. Finding a good price-to-performance ratio is hard.

I'd prefer to future proof with AX. I'd like robust features that include VPN, parental control, reporting, and more.

I'd prefer something that could use OpenWRT or similar as a fallback, in case the vendor abandons it or I loose confidence in its firmware. (I've done DD-WRT on a WRT54G, so generally familiar with what all this means.)

I think "just a router" is best. I have a single-story house where the A20 permeates everywhere I need with no issues, so I don't think mesh has value. Also, I have no Ethernet wired in, so mesh devices would have to be wirelessly connected.

I'm open to Unifi and have helped with some corporate installs of it, but I am concerned it may be too much for my needs.

What works well for you?

In a sea of recommendations for Mikrotik, TP-Link, UniFi, etc. -- all routers I was looking at getting myself -- I'm hesitant to share the blissful state of https://firewalla.com

I had crossed the bridge of being tired of configuring OpenWRT, DD-WRT, Tomato, etc. over the years. I just wanted something that worked reliably and was intuitive to both setup and manage.

With the Firewalla Purple and their iOS app, I've never seen such good UI/UX in a networking product, and it's been a great experience (I recommend the Purple or the Gold).

> I'm hesitant to share the blissful state of https://firewalla.com

Per https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010465893 >A mobile phone is required to use all products

Why would I spend $300-600 on something closed-source which requires a mobile phone to administer it when I can spend the same on this which is 100% open source and bulletproof?

https://shop.opnsense.com/

Have a favorite AP to pair with the Firewalla?

Aruba Instant On access points work great with the Firewalla.

https://www.arubainstanton.com/products/access-points/

Mikrotik hap ax3 seems to fill all your requirements at a good price https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_ax3

It's not open wrt but their routerOS is very open.

Quick start config via the mobile app also removes barrier of having to use winbox/go deep into routeros. It's come a long way on mobile!

Is it a hard requirement to handle wifi as well as WAN routing in one box? If not, I can recommend OPNsense from personal use for a couple of years now. I bought an inexpensive fanless mini-pc from Amazon maybe 10 years ago, and started out with pfsense. When pfsense broke bad I switched to OPNsense and I haven't looked back.

I use a separate AP for wireless access, so that can be much dumber since most of the smarts sit in OPNsense.

The main reason I went this direction initially was that most consumer-grade all in one routers were not well-equipped to take advantage of a gigabit synchronous connection, so I wanted something beefier.

Not hard requirement, but prefer simplicity and lower cost.

UniFi Dream Machine has been the best router I have ever owned by a mile. It just works and saves a lot of headaches.

If you truly don’t care, I would just get whatever router your ISP gives you.

Strong agree with this. There’s a lot it does well out of the box, as well as the ability to customise to meet niche desires.

With the help of https://github.com/unifi-utilities/unifios-utilities it can also act as a docker host for most common home network services.

Since I have gigabit internet, looks like I need to do a Dream Machine Pro and an access point?

Actually what I might have is the "Dream Router". I thought at one point it had also have been called "Dream Machine"

https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-unifi-os-cons...

I have ~350 Mbit down, and don't have any issues.

Got it. I have gigabit, so UDR won’t work well for me.

I'm pretty happy with a x86 openwrt router:

https://teklager.se/en/products/routers/apu2e5-open-source-r...

I'm running NixOS on https://teklager.se/en/products/routers/APU2E0-open-source-r.... Working great. And interestingly when I upgraded to NixOS 22.11, its power consumption went down from ~12W to ~7W. In the NixOS matrix channel it was suggested that it might be because of new power management work in the kernel.

I did some research on a new router late last year, when I was specifically looking to switch to OpenWRT. I found a lot of recommendations for the TP-Link AC1900[1]. I bought one, installed OpenWRT, and it's been basically perfect so far.

I'm sure there are other good options, possibly even better ones. But this thing works a treat so far.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NF3K74H/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

Thank you. The AC4000 version of this very router is the A20 that I am currently using and am not crazy about.

To be clear: You're saying that OpenWRT does work on the Archer A20? It's not on the list at https://openwrt.org/toh/start. It would be exciting if I can throw OpenWRT on this router!

Also, if I was to replace, hoping to go AX for future proofing.

As I understand it, the AC1900 is Archer A9 based. In either case, OpenWRT runs on my AC1900 just fine. I don't have any insight into anything related to the A20.

I should also add that this is my first TP-Link product, and my first time running OpenWRT, so don't take anything I say as gospel. I'd been mainly a Netgear guy for the last 20 years or so until about October of last year.

Thank you. It's odd that Amazon puts two entirely different routers on the same page.

Ah. I see what you mean now. Yeah, that toggle button does toggle between two fairly distinct products. Not sure why they did that. And I didn't even notice it at first. I just grabbed the link to the item I bought previously. :-)

A bit pricey but you can always look at the Ubiquiti products[1].

[1] https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-wireless

Their product line is confusing. Finding something that supports AX and gigabit internet and doesn’t break the bank doesn’t appear to be doable with their product line.

It is a bit confusing right now I find!

I think you need a seperate Unifi router and APs to get wifi 6/AX.

The integrated cylinder Dream Machines don’t seem to do wifi 6. Not sure :-)

Hard to work out.

The Turris Omnia is a good option, though perhaps not for the prices I see listed today (I paid $150 a year or two ago). Runs a customized (still open source) version of OpenWrt by default, but you can load anything you want on it - it's basically just a small Linux box with WiFi antennas (and some other nice-to-haves like an SFP port, mPCIe slots, etc...). I used their official kit to upgrade from AC to AX, but you can also DIY if you were to purchase the older AC version of the router.

Link - https://www.turris.com/en/omnia/overview/

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I used to have a lot of complicated setups that used static IPs, DSL connections with an ISP that supported MLPPP which I used Tomato firmware with VPN and QoS configs.

Now networking is pretty good using stock ISP provided modem/router and I added Netgear mesh base station and 2 satellites. The satellites have an Ethernet port which I use for the gaming PC-that's all that I need. Considered a PiHole but uBlock origin is good enough.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34283266

A PC Engines board [1] running OpenBSD would be my preference, but at present it doesn't have the horsepower to route a gigabit of traffic on this OS. A worthy tradeoff, IMO, but others may disagree. Can run Linux or OPNsense [2], too, on these headless boxes.

[1] https://www.pcengines.ch/

[2] https://opnsense.org/

I was so impressed by Synology's NAS products that I decided to checkout their routers when finally upgrading from my Apple Airport this year.

I went with the WRX560 and so far I'm really happy with it.

The SRM software is on par with the NAS DSM software, which is to say its easy to use and looks great.

I created several wifi networks, including one just for home IOT stuffs, and even assigned one of the back ethernet ports to same network for my wired IOT devices.

So far I'm happy ...

I went with a Synology router in 2019 almost entirely due to how nice SRM was. It's still running fine. Maybe the competition had time to catch up, but I never had a reason to look.

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/openwrt-as-...

OPNSense running on a mini pc, with a separate AP for WiFi. OpenWRT is good too.

anything that runs openwrt :-)

Isn't it that all devices that support OpenWrt cannot run at 1gps speeds (because of no available chip drivers)? For this reason I just replaced my Archer c7 which capped at ~300mbps. Now I run with mikrotik router. Very flexible but steep learning curve.

I wasn't aware of that tbh. I'm curious, at how many MB/s does your downstream peak via WiFi now?

I dont know WiFi, but ethernet is now capped by my ISP plan: https://pasteboard.co/AGJiRV287mTA.jpg

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