Suggestions for ethernet router on gigabit broadband

I have a 1Gbps broadband connection at home from Hyperoptic but the supplied "Hyperhub" (ZTE H298N) isn't very good. Although it has two VoIP ports that I don't need, it doesn't have 802.11ac wifi or sophisticated port forwarding. I can't get more than 50Mbps on my iPhone 6, whereas I would be able to get much more on 802.11ac.

I'm therefore looking for a gigabit ethernet (non-ADSL) router with the following functionality:
- 1Gbps WAN port
- 1Gbps 4xLAN ports
- 802.11b/g/n/ac wifi
- DHCP by each LAN client's MAC address
- Port forwarding where a range of remote IP addresses can be permissioned. For example forward all packets from 94.[116-119].*.* on port 12345 to LAN client 192.168.1.25 on port 3389.
- Uploadable configuration, e.g. telnet or config file

Can anyone recommend a suitable router?

Not 100% sure that you can just swap out the hyperoptic device

Have asked if swap possible. In meantime just add a suitable wireless access point is best option. In short one that does wireless ac

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Not 100% sure that you can just swap out the hyperoptic device

You can. Hyperoptic have confirmed that many people have done so without a problem and you don't even need to notify them. There's no validation of the WAN port's MAC address for example.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

In meantime just add a suitable wireless access point is best option. In short one that does wireless ac

That doesn't solve the problem whereby any IP address in the world can currently access sensitive ports that I would like to restrict to specific ranges of remote IP addresses.

Have confirmed you can swap them out.

Issue is finding one that can handle Gigabit of WAN to LAN and suggestion seems to be Netgear Nighthawk R7000 for £149 which is at top of the smallnetbuilder throughput chart

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/router-charts/...

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Issue is finding one that can handle Gigabit of WAN to LAN and suggestion seems to be Netgear Nighthawk R7000 for £149 which is at top of the smallnetbuilder throughput chart

Thanks, but this router doesn't support restricting port forwarding to a range of remote IP addresses, according to the manual at http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/R7000/R70... Even my old Speedtouch ADSL routers supported this, but Netgear seem to exclude this basic parameter from port forwarding on all of their routers.

Dependant on your price range you could try a MikroTik - the RB2011 is ok however, seeing as its gigabit, if you have budget one of their CCR's should easily have enough CPU to handle full throttle.

There are a couple of problems with what you want to do.

Unfortunately manufacturer firmware tends to be extremely locked down in regards to advanced features. Source-specific port forwarding will be supported by the router's underlying Linux/IPtables but is unlikely to be exposed by the manufacturer.

Replacing the router's firmware with a third-party one (such as OpenWrt) will allow you to do the source-specific port forwarding but you'll then run into another problem; throughput.

Rather than put decent CPUs in their routers manufacturers have continued to use the same weedy processors for years. They've managed to keep up with the increasing speed of connections by off-loading the packet processing into hardware using closed, proprietary hackery. Unfortunately many third-party firmware doesn't support these hardware off-loads and so speeds are no where near 1Gbps (typical hardware maxes out at around 200Mbps).

Samadeus suggested a Mikrotek and that should definitely do the port forwarding you want, but the 1Gbps throughput will cost you.

My suggestion would be a combination of products to do what you need:

Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite - This will cope with your 1Gbps connection (using hardware off-load) and allow you to do the port forwarding you want. Since it's a full (Debian) Linux system it'll allow you to do a lot of advanced stuff if you want. May be a steep learning curve though. £89 (There's also a 5-port version for ~£150).

TL-SG1005D 5-Port Gigabit Switch - Since the ERL only has 3 ports you may need a switch. This one is under £13.

The ERL doesn't have Wifi built-in so you'll need an 802.11ac access point (or router in AP mode). I'm not too familiar with these though (still on 802.11n and always immediately flash my routers to OpenWrt). Ubiquiti do make a range of wireless access points, but the AC models are prohibitively expensive.

Take a look at the top-end Draytek model. They can do 1Gbps - used models often come up on eBay quite cheap.

I still haven't found a suitable router. Has anything else come on to the market recently that does what I need? The problem is the port forwarding. Almost every router seems to open up the port to be accessed by every IP address on the internet instead of restricting the port to a specific range of IP addresses.

This is often split into two areas, i.e. you set up the port forward which is for all Internet IP address and then use the SPI firewall to restrict the actual IP ranges it is visible to.