zzing123

I find all this a bit amusing for a "consumer grade" router

Sounds much more like a medium grade business, than an ordinary household!

Ubiquiti's consumer grade system is called Amplifi, and may be worth a look at. It's more of an affordable all-in-one solution than their prosumer Unifi range, though not as flexible or powerful

They have launched a model in the US (not here yet) which includes "Wifi 6" (802.11ax). Presumably not too long before it arrives over here

In reply to a post by PianSomB:

Ubiquiti's consumer grade system is called Amplifi, and may be worth a look at. It's more of an affordable all-in-one solution than their prosumer Unifi range, though not as flexible or powerful

They have launched a model in the US (not here yet) which includes "Wifi 6" (802.11ax). Presumably not too long before it arrives over here

I'm afraid just because its made by Ubiquiti, that's no guarantee it will be any good. I bought the Amplifi Alien a month or two ago via a US freight forwarding company. I paid around £300 (excl shipping), so hardly a cheap router. Wifi 5/6 performance was nothing special, it was on a par with my £60 Phicomm K3 router which I keep as a spare. Certainly nowhere near as good as high end Asus or Netgear routers.

I found the Alien's firmware restricted, it didn't allow you to do basic stuff like change wifi radio channels...quite poor for a router costing £100s. Luckily I managed to sell it for more than £400 on ebay so wasn't out of pocket. Due to lack of supply, these are being sold for as much as $600-$700 on ebay. Sheer madness to pay this much for a router which is nowhere the best wrt wifi performance. IMHO probably worth about £100-£150 given that's its targeted at non-technical users - you can only configure it via a smartphone app.

Edited by deleted (Fri 10-Apr-20 16:14:35)

In reply to a post by zzing123:

If you want to do smart queues and QoS with fq_codel, you will need a bit more horsepower, and the EdgeRouter 4 or 6 will be enough for that, as will any of the beefier OpenWRT-capable routers. This already gets a bit much for Microtiks though.

Depends which model of Mikrotik. Performance-wide, the RB4011iGS+RM will walk over most home routers, while the CCR1036-8G-2S+ will grind them into dust However they don't do fq_codel.

In reply to a post by zzing123:

Finally, the biggest horsepower requirement comes with IDS/IPS (intrusion detection/protection). If you want the device to sniff for any potential malware, it needs a lot of grunt to process at gigabit speeds. Only the Unifi UDM or quite a beefy pfSense PC (Xeon-D level) will handle that.

Given that most traffic these days is TLS, edge IDS is becoming of less and less value - unless you decide to do man-in-the-middle traffic interception with your own fake CA, in which case, you get to keep the pieces.

Compare and contrast prices: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=asus+router&ref=nb_sb_n...

vs EdgeMax: https://www.msdist.co.uk/ubiquiti/edgemax/edgerouter
or Mikrotik: https://www.msdist.co.uk/mikrotik/hex

So it depends what you mean by 'consumer', because it doesn't necessarily mean cheaper.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Depends which model of Mikrotik. Performance-wide, the RB4011iGS+RM will walk over most home routers, while the CCR1036-8G-2S+ will grind them into dust However they don't do fq_codel.

Absolutely. And on a non-asymmetric line, you don't even need QoS - it only matters when there's a bottleneck and you need smart traffic management just like a road junction. It's ironic that a leased line requires much less complexity and horsepower to drive than a DSL line

In reply to a post by zzing123:

Given that most traffic these days is TLS, edge IDS is becoming of less and less value - unless you decide to do man-in-the-middle traffic interception with your own fake CA, in which case, you get to keep the pieces.

True, too.

Wasn't looking at prices, just the complexity of what is being talked about for a home consumer.