Home network equipment

[pzelenka]

Hi,

I'm glad that I found this forum. I hope I find useful information and advice here.

I'm building home 1Gbit network and I would appreciate any suggestions with router, switch and wifi AP selection. My network schema is depicted on attached picture.
Most of the traffic is video streaming either from Internet or NAS and web browsing. I also plan to setup a VPN connection but just for occasional lightweight use.

I consider these products:

Router: Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite, TP-Link TL-R600VPN
Switch: Linksys LGS 308P, Linksys LGS318, Ubiquiti TOUGHSwitch TS‑8‑PRO, TP-Link TL-2216
AP: Ubiquiti Unifi UAP-AC-LITE, Edimax CAP1200

What are yours suggestions?

Thanks

Pavel

 

[System Error Message]

the ERL is a poor choice because of the USB storage and VPN routers have unstable firmware, besides all consumer routers now have VPN and the ARM ones have better throughput already if your goal is to use openVPN. If you want VPN throughput than you're going to want a router with a more complex CPU and neither of those routers will do VPN at 1Gb/s.

If you are going for a managed switch the ubiquiti is the best of the 3, followed by linksys. Both wifi APs are fine.

You need to mention how much VPN throughput you want and type (such as pptp, ipsec, openvpn, etc).

 

[pzelenka]

I plan to use the VPN occasionally for downloading some documents or supervise the network when I'm on vacation. So the VPN throughput is not so important for me as I take it as nice to have feature.
I quite surprised that ERL is a bad choice. On other forums people glorify it. However I was also disappointed that it uses USB storage.

 

[joegreat]

Router: Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite, TP-Link TL-R600VPN
Switch: Linksys LGS 308P, Ubiquiti TOUGHSwitch TS‑8‑PRO, TP-Link TL-2216
AP: Ubiquiti Unifi UAP-AC-LITE, Edimax CAP1200

Hi Pavel,

On the router side I vote for Asus and Asus only! As you can see from my footer I run multiple Asus devices in Router and AP mode!
As main router I suggest the RT-AC68U for stability and feature reasons or - if you can effort - the RT-AC88U (but you need some patience for the firmware to stabilize as it's a pretty new product).

The reason is the software/firmware: Asus does a great job to update and enhance the firmware and Merlin (plus others) do an even better job to add features and to resolve remaining issues!

On AP side same answer: Go for Asus router and put them into AP mode!
Depending on the WLAN speed needs, you can use cheap Asus routers like RT-N12, RT-N18U or RT-AC51U, or you go for the WLAN range champion RT-N66U with John's fork firmware.

And for the switch: Here I have no preference...

With kind regards
Joe

 

[coxhaus]

I think setting your core up with a layer 3 switch is the way to go. I run a Cisco SG300-28 not POE switch as the not power switch only uses 17 watts flat out. These can be had off eBay used for a good price. You pretty much can configure anything you want at layer 3 using VLANs and ACLs.

 

[pzelenka]

the ERL is a poor choice because of the USB storage

Why is it bad? As I understand it is just a storage where RouterOS is placed. It shouldn't affect the routing performace. Or not?

 

[System Error Message]

the ERL doesnt use routerOS, it uses edgeOS. The issue with usb storage is that when you update it thinks the drive is bad or that the OS isnt original.

 

[abailey]

the ERL doesnt use routerOS, it uses edgeOS. The issue with usb storage is that when you update it thinks the drive is bad or that the OS isnt original.

I guess this is a problem for some. I have never had an issue when updating my ERL OS.

 

[System Error Message]

Still the ERL uses MIPS which is slow for VPN and the tplink variant uses the same CPU. type of VPN matters in the choice so if it is PPTP based than MIPS would be fast enough, if it is openVPN you may want to consider a dual core ARM router but none of these routers will give you throughput past 100Mb/s and they will be a lot lower mainly depending on the type you use.

Still between those 2 choices the ERL is better because it has more stable firmware. The usb storage is what causes the issues with the OS for some but it is a significant enough percentage affected. Consumer routers you can either select ASUS with a faster dual core ARM and use RMerlin's firmware or a consumer router with similar CPU with 3rd party firmware like tomato or openwrt.

The other choices you havent yet considered, mikrotik RB1100AHx2 has IPSEC acceleration and is much faster for VPN and firewall than the ERL despite not having hardware acceleration, than theres the x86 based solutions such as pfsense, a linux or unix server based OS, and some UTM distributions. If you are able to configure ubiquiti edgeOS than you have a wide variaty of options even cisco's expensive professional and configurable routers.

Routers like the RVxxx or xxxVPN (various brands) are very bad choices because even though they use the same CPU as ubiquiti they have very unstable implementations, not sure if firmware or hardware. In the past they used to be a choice where VPN was needed and stock or 3rd party firmwares lacked that functionality.