Advice on home gigabit build

[e3b0c442]

Hello,

I've finally gotten tired of not getting the speed in my house that I'm paying for (yes, I understand that fundamentally most services could not serve me at gigabit speed anyway, but that's not the point! ) and am looking to upgrade my consumer-level router (Asus RT-AC68U) to something that can take full advantage of my gigabit fiber line. Unfortunately, I have much more experience with data center/telco level hardware, which would be overkill and break the bank (not to mention the power budget).

I've done a fair amount of research (and lost way too much sleep) this week, and the consensus seems to be that Mikrotik and Ubiquiti are going to be my best bets for a prosumer setup like this. I'm specifically looking at the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 4, and the MikroTik RB4011. I'm currently leaning toward the MikroTik, as it seems that it is more purpose-built as a router (vs the Ubiquiti which seems to be a jack-of-all-trades, master of none), and because it has a switching chip (and more ports), negating the need for me to buy an external switch. I have no issues setting up a Raspberry Pi to handle DNS/DHCP, though I've been gifted an older RB2011 from a friend and it seems to handle those tasks without issue.

I'm not expecting to need to do a whole lot of specialized stuff with the router; i.e. I don't need QoS or a ton of fancy firewall rules. What I do need, mostly due to the CenturyLink connection, is the ability to terminate PPPoE on a VLAN without losing hardware acceleration (or fast enough hardware to still get the gigabit in software... but honestly even with my limited knowledge I know that's probably out of my budget.

My questions are...
1) Are there other options besides these two that I should look at? I'm trying to keep this under $250. I looked at building a pfSense box (and at some prebuilt ones), but it looks like those are out of my price range. I was also intrigued by the Banana Pi BPI-R64, but it looks like that hasn't actually shown up in the wild yet.

2) Is there any gotchas I need to be aware of with either the Ubiquiti or MicroTik solutions that would prevent me from getting full gigabit throughput?

Thanks for your expertise

 

[CaptainSTX]

Before you start throwing money at the problem have you tested your hardware on your LAN? Start by running LAN speed tests across your LAN. The AC68 has gig ports so it can handle the switching at gig speeds. If you because of your PCs speed or wiring can't get close to gig speed then no router is going to make them faster. If you only have a single PC that can get close to gig speed then see if you can borrow another PC to run the tests. Even if you can't get gig speeds you will save yourself a lot of frustration knowing the speed problem is at your end and it is not the ISP failing to deliver.

 

[e3b0c442]

Before you start throwing money at the problem have you tested your hardware on your LAN? Start by running LAN speed tests across your LAN. The AC68 has gig ports so it can handle the switching at gig speeds. If you because of your PCs speed or wiring can't get close to gig speed then no router is going to make them faster. If you only have a single PC that can get close to gig speed then see if you can borrow another PC to run the tests. Even if you can't get gig speeds you will save yourself a lot of frustration knowing the speed problem is at your end and it is not the ISP failing to deliver.

Yes, the problem is 100% the router WAN termination. If I connect a Linux box directly to the line I can get the full speed; same box immediately behind the router gets about 300-400Mbps, with the router CPU utilization at 100%. Unfortunately it appears the PPPoE termination and/or the VLAN tagging prevent hardware offload.

Machine-to-machine through the router works fine too (No surprise, gigabit switching isn't rocket science these days )

 

[MichaelCG]

Pick up a used enterprise desktop from your local electronics recycler, Microcenter, or Newegg along with an additional Gbps NIC. Should be easy to stay under your budget limit while able to handle your 1Gbps connection running pfSense.