On 12/13/2018 11:42 AM, Jonathan Duncan wrote: > I have been using a NetGear Nighthawk R7000 for several years now, and > becoming less and less satisfied with it as the firmware keeps getting > worse and worse. The device is currently in a hardly usable state. I am > about to revert it to some much older firmware to see if that even helps. > > In the meantime, I am in the market for some new network hardware for my > house. I used to be a fan of NetGear stuff, and I still have a bunch of > their switches and they rock. But I am not looking to upgrade to any more > of their routers. > > I have recently been intrigued by Ubiquiti products ( > https://www.ubnt.com/products/). We use devices from Ubiquiti at work, and > they have been pretty solid. Not sure which product would be best for my > home use yet. > > I am open to suggestions for routers and access points, either combined or > separate, that can handle a house full of computers and active users. There > is a lot of video streaming and gaming going on, including outgoing > streaming (Twitch) and media serving (Plex). The wireless access points are > not used for the most heavy traffic, as most of the devices that are media > heavy are wired.
A long time ago I separated my router from my WiFi access points. I just find it simpler to work with a Linux (or BSD) based router with a real distro that I can set up with openvpn, my own DNS, dhcp (linked to DNS for setting device names), web filtering, and NAT. Low-end NUCs or similar machines are small and somewhat power efficient even if they are more money than these consumer router devices. If your switches support 802.1q VLANs, you can use just one ethernet port on the router mini computer (gigabit probably) to simultaneously handle WAN (natted) and LAN traffic. For WiFi I just use whatever decent home unit I like at the moment. Can be easily replaced and I don't rely on any of its firmware features other than WiFi itself. DHCP is turned off and I use only the LAN ports on it to bridge WiFi onto the LAN. As long as the wifi stays up and the connections to it are stable, I don't care much about the firmware and its features. Suppose I should a bit, though. Don't want any windows machines to hack it. I use a fair number of Ubiquiti Nanostation M5s to do point to point links to some out buildings. They work very well. I get nearly a full 100 Mbit/s across those links, which is pretty respectable seeing as the ethernet port on them is only 100 Mbit. The link itself can do about 150 Mbit/s each way on a 5.8 GHz link. While doing some troubleshooting the other day, I noticed that one of the M5s could see the 5.8 GHz access point on a desk in my parents house some 600 feet away through trees and walls, and connect to it and get okay speeds out of it. In their house my phone can barely see it through a couple of walls. So I was impressed by the gain on that antenna. My only beef with the M5 units is that they use their own PoE scheme, so they aren't compatible with a standard 48v PoE switch, which would be really nice. Got to deal with power injectors and little wall warts. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
