Looking for Advanced QoS and Access Control

[jwitt98]

Hi Folks,
New to this forum...
I'm looking for a budget router for home use but I need one that has advanced QoS and access control features. I currently have a Netgear AC1750 (R6350). The QoS and access control features built in to this router are very limited.
I'm looking for a router that can:

• Monitor bandwidth of individual clients and provide historical data
• Monitor WAN bandwidth and provide historical data
• police individual clients by mac address and configure their uplink and downlink bandwidth limits
• police the WAN interface by setting uplink and downlink bandwidth limits
• Provide basic QoS functions such as assigning priority to clients and services.
• Access control of individual clients by day and time of day
• Access control of WAN by day and time of day

I'm looking to spend under $150, but will consider going to $200 if I have to. Are there any routers on the market with these features, or at least most of these features in this price range? The ability to monitor client bandwidth and to police individual clients are the most important features I'm looking for so these 2 aren't optional. I can live without most of the others, but it would be nice if it had all these features.
Thanks in advance for any recommendations.

 

[jwitt98]

...just thought I would post back with an update since I didn't get any recommendations so others finding this thread might find it useful.
I ended up purchasing an ASUS RT-AC66U_B1 for only $100. It has almost all of the features I needed:

• (Check) Monitor bandwidth of individual clients and provide historical data
  • As a bonus, you can do a deep dive and see specifically what apps/services on each client are using the most bandwidth
• (Check) Monitor WAN bandwidth and provide historical data
• (Check) police individual clients by mac address and configure their uplink and downlink bandwidth limits
• police the WAN interface by setting uplink and downlink bandwidth limits
  • The ASUS does not have this feature, although I solved this problem by using an old Linksys router flashed with DD-WRT that I had laying around. I placed it upstream on the WAN side and use it's port throttling feature to apply limits to the WAN bandwidth. This seems to accomplish what i need.
• (Check) Provide basic QoS functions such as assigning priority to clients and services.
  • The ASUS does have good QoS features, but it can only operate in one of 3 modes at a given time, adaptive QoS, standard QoS, and Bandwidth Limiter Mode. Since I have it operating in Bandwidth limiter mode, I can't simultaneously take advantage of the other QoS features, but they are there if I ever decide to use them in lieu of the bandwidth limiter mode.
• (Check) Access control of individual clients by day and time of day
  • Surprisingly this router doesn't have this feature, at least not like what I was expecting. There is a LAN to WAN Network Service Filter that allows you to control access to certain ports and protocols for given IPs or IP ranges and for given days and time duration, but there is no specific MAC filtering that I could see and no way to easily block a client from all access.
  • (Update) Per the post below by ColinTaylor, this router does in fact have this feature. Its a bit tucked away under AiProtection >> Parental Controls >> Time Scheduling, but it is there and works as expected.
• (Check) Access control of WAN by day and time of day
  • The router does not have this feature, but I am able to control this with the Linksys router running DD-WRT mentioned above placed on the WAN side of the ASUS.
  • (Update) Per the post below by ColinTaylor, this can be accomplished by using the router's Network Services Filter, leaving the source and destination IP fields blank (which defaults to all IPs) and selecting a range of ports to block (i.e. 1:65535)

Overall, the ASUS had most of the feature I needed and it seems like a solid router and a good value for the money. Compared to the Netgear mentioned in my post above, the ASUS wins hands down with the level of QoS features. The Netgear was very lacking in this area. In the end, I still had to use a combination of 2 routers to get all the features I wanted.

 

[ColinTaylor]

• Access control of individual clients by day and time of day
  • Look at AiProtection > Time Scheduling
• Access control of WAN by day and time of day
  • Not sure what you mean by this but I would think you could use the Network Services Filter to do this. You can specify the entire LAN instead of individual IPs and all ports.

 

[jwitt98]

@ColinTaylor - Thanks for the tips, these two things do in fact work. Not sure how I missed that time scheduling feature. My above post has been edited to reflect these new findings.
So this router supports all but one of the features I was looking for. I suppose that's not bad considering it was only a $100 router.

 

[Klutch14u]

jwitt98, I stumbled on this looking for a way to monitor individual device usage throughout the month so I can determine who/what is using my allotted monthly provider cap. In plain English, does this router do that? I've become very frustrated trying to find a router that does this, plainly and cleanly. Thanks

 

[jwitt98]

jwitt98, I stumbled on this looking for a way to monitor individual device usage throughout the month so I can determine who/what is using my allotted monthly provider cap. In plain English, does this router do that? I've become very frustrated trying to find a router that does this, plainly and cleanly. Thanks

Yes... this router monitors individual client usage and displays the results in a pie chart so you can see which clients are using the most bandwidth on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis