Hey yall. I’m looking for recommendations for a quality 6-port wireless router that will cover my household well. I live in a 900 sq. ft. row home in the city, so it’s really not that big of a property to cover wirelessly. My experience with the new FiOS router (white trash can) has just been terrible and getting FiOS to do anything about it has been a nightmare. I suspect there my be issues at the ONT level, but that’s another ordeal I’m trying to get them to check out.
I’m looking for a 6-port router to support all my wired devices, 3x PCs, 2x Roku Ultras, and 1x Arlo Cam System. I currently have a FiOS gigabit plan with tested speeds of ~600 down / ~850 up (surprisingly). I want something GOOD. Something stable. I’ve tried my hand with various Netgear routers and most recently the TPLink Archer C5400 which lasted for about a year then began producing issues. I’d also prefer something not crazy expensive if possible (but at the end of the day I’d rather pay more for a quality router than a piece of shit that’ll last <2 years.)
My go-to would be a Ubiquiti Unifi (separate router/switch/access point), which would run you around 500…
I like them because you get multiple devices where they don’t just abandon the software as soon as the new revision of hardware with a different plastic shell hits the market (typical supported lifespan of 5y is not unheard of). And because they’re separate components you can upgrade them piecemeal. Also, you get to manage multiple wifi access points from a single place.
There’s other more expensive alternatives I like (ruckus unleashed), but not that many cheaper options.
I just ordered a dream machine pro a 24 port pro poe switch and 2 access points i hope it all goes well but yeah the stuff is a little pricy but hopefully worth it. The dream machine one of the lite switches and an access point if needed would be a great deal and a good way to get a nice network.
if you want cheep and good look into custom firmware for off the self consumer routers. if you want real support and a decent price point wendell did a review of EnGenius products and they look promising. not certain if you can flash custom firmware onto them to prolong their life past a few revisions.
RB2011 UiAS-2… is 5x Gigabit + 5x Fast-Ethernet + 1x SFP (could be turned into RJ45 Gigabit). It would also allow to add more access points should you need them.
Don’t. Get a router with 2 or 5 ports (of which 1 WAN) and get an 8 port gigabit / 2.5gbps (for future-proofing) switch. You can find cheap 2nd hand switches.
Hmm, since you are on a limited budget, I’d wonder if you can find a 2nd hand router with support for 802.11ac (WiFi 5) that you can flash open/dd-wrt on it or an Asus that you can flash Asuswrt-Merlin on, unless you really want 802.11ax (WiFi 6), which is going to be a little costly… I have 2 TP-Link TL-WR1043ND first gen that run the lastest version of dd-wrt (built a few days ago) which I absolutely love (especially the support for Wireguard out-of-the-box). The bad part is that they don’t have WiFi 5, but I don’t mind, there aren’t many WiFi signals around me.
I’m personally a big fan of pfSense DIY router, but it can get quite costly. Try looking for a used ASRock Q1900M, 2GB of DDR3 (maybe 2x 2GB for dual-channel overkill, but you can get away with 1GB of RAM), a used 1 gbps NIC and a new, <300w psu (overkill, if you could find something <100W, that would be better, but not the poorest quality in the world). The case can be anything you find for cheap. But I highly doubt you can build a pfSense box and get a cheap access point for cheaper than a 2nd hand TP-Link or Linksys router that you can run a router OS and have WiFi on it.
Heck, I would bet it would be cheaper to buy an ~$150 RT-AX56U, which has WiFi 6 and supports Asuswrt-Merlin. Yeah, I would recommend this, albeit I haven’t used it myself, so I cannot vouch for it.
To second the above nighthawk recommendation above, I recently put in a Netgear orbi mesh system. Not a nighthawk but same vendor…
The router side is reasonable for consumer gear, Netgear (at least for their current products) actually do firmware updates and performance has been great.
They also offer some anti-malware services with the gear via bit defender, seems ok so far…
I can definitely confirm that wifi 6 seems to be worth it, even without wifi 6 endpoints everywhere. With the orbi mesh set up, I’m getting the max speed limit of every device I have in my 4 bedroom house, pretty much everywhere in the house
I have one wifi 6 capable device, a pc with a wifi 6 card in it, getting 1200 Mb/sec to an AP about 12 metres away, through a couple of brick walls.
Usually the generic consumer models are compromised in some meaningful way in both the router software and the wifi quality. Depending on your needs, it may be worth getting a dedicated router and separate wifi component.
