I want to upgrade my wireless network at home. Currently I am using the wireless router the I got from the phone provider. It is a Huawai router woring with a SIM card on the 4G network. I usually get about 80 - 100 mbits down and up, thats ok. But I am currently having problems managing all my IoT devices. Additionally I am planing to upgrade my provider to someone using the 5G network to get some decent pings (now I have 20 to 200ms depending on the time of day) and I will have to reconfigure all my devices to a new router anyway.
I am planing on spending about 150$ for a new router that should be able to manage 20 active devices on at least a 5Ghz and a 2.4 Ghz network.
Cable is not an option in my building because the company wants 300$ just for the cable usage every year and it would be much more expensive than the mobile network option.
Depends on how your home is laid out, a dedicated wireless router probably won’t be much more beneficial than your current ISP provided wireless gateway.
I recommend using a pfsense VM, either on your local machine with a dedicated NIC for the internet side or on a separate machine with 2 NICs. It gives you a lot of control as well as performance, depending on how many vCPUs you give it, and it is adjustable depending on if you find you need more memory or storage later. In addition, use a small business (like Ubipuiti) WAP that doesn’t have WPS (a HUGE security hole) for wireless access. This will keep your wireless from getting hacked and someone sharing our movies or music and getting you sued. (the first half happened to me, but I didn’t get sued, only threatened. I’m super secure now.)
Off the shelf routers are too easy to hack, mostly over WPS. They’re absolutely horrible for security. Even turning “off” WPS won’t help in most cases because all it does it turn off the advertising for the feature, and it can still be hacked. Getting something without WPS is the only way to go in my opinion.
With Hyper-V, you can create a local pfsense VM for a router that would use some of that spare CPU power of today’s processors. Just make sure you don’t connect the main OS to the internet side NIC. There are guides all over the internet for it.
I prefer having a VMWare ESXi free hypervisor (just google “VMWare Free Hypervisor”) host for the router VM. Building such a thing also will give you skills needed for career enhancement. Being experienced with VM host software is massively useful in finding a good job these days. Chalk the expense of it up as “educational”. I make more than the average full family working in Cloud support. It’s well worth it.
Just some ideas I thought I’d throw out there. Make of it what you will.
Might be a few years before 5G is widespread and working well. So far deployments seem to be concentrated in high density areas, and an odd random.
How come $300/year is a lot for internet access compared to lte? My cable broadband is €65 and cell phone with 5G data is €30 / month? Where do you live?
OP said “the company wants 300$ just for the cable usage every year”. They also mentioned “a building”, presumably they live in an apartment, and I’d assumed the price includes cable internet access but apparently not.
Often times buildings will have fiber to a utility cabinet somewhere in the basement and then Ethernet to appartments and ISP will have some kind of special pricing rate for building residents, which is why I’d assumed 300 pa includes the service, apparently it’s just an access fee
It’s like this. Every house here has a DSL cable connected to the house If you move there, you can choose to use the cable and be able to get a DSL contract. Otherwise you don’t pay for the cable, even if it still is technically there, but a electrician comes and disables your access to the cable. You no longer pay 300$ / year as you’re not using the cable.
The DSL contracts are 80$/month (with phone and TV that I don’t need)
So DSL would be 60 + (300/12) = 100$/ month for 250mbit/s
I’m still skeptical when it comes to 5G. Most test have shown that, even with line of sight, a window or tree or such is enough to not get a connection. Even Rain or Fog can make the connection unreliable.
How are you getting a reliable 5G connection to your Router? So far it reminds me a lot of satelite TV when i was younger. Rain Outside would mean no TV that night…
Thats in euro’s right? Which is about $350 USD. We pay $103 a month. Thats over $1200 a year with a 1 TB cap each month. We would do hand stands if we could only pay Comcast $300-$350 a year for service. OH by the way, that price is just for internet, no TV or Phone service.