Any good router recommendations? Specifically with compatibility to open firmware.

Xaero_toast

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 29, 2008
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393
Well, the time has finally come to upgrade the router. It's an old WRT54G, that has been running DD-WRT for over 10 years.
It's worked well for me, but I need more wireless bandwidth and gigabit wired ports. It's also probably a good idea to get up to current wireless security standards anyway.

Is DD-WRT still a good open router firmware, or are there better options? Back when I first tried it, it added a lot of features over the default linksys firmware. I may need a fair degree of configurability, as there's a fair chance I will be building a wireless bridge to share internet with my farm. I live on the edge of town, but from my antenna tower I have line of sight to my parents farm. Down the road, when I add the wireless bridge link, I will have multiple subnets (my home, my parents home, and farm office).

Linksys equipment has done well for me. In the absence of a good reason to do otherwise, I will probably go with them again, but my knowledge on this is highly out of date and if anyone has some current information to share, I'm all ears.

Thanks
 
If you were happy with a WRT54G for all these years, literally anything you can grab off a shelf in any store will probably be such a mind-bending experience you could be happy with anything. The WRT54G was probably the first widespread wifi router. I've never run the alternative router operating systems like DD-WRT but I think it's still reasonable.

What kind of budget are you looking to put into equipment? Does it have to be all-in-one with wifi in the router or can they be separate? What is your connection speed? For consumer type router units similar to your Linksys, Asus, TP-Link and Synology all make quality units that would fit your requirements. Linksys also makes some newer ones, but I think a lot has changed since yours with that company and I'd lean to one of the other brands I mentioned. TP-Link makes some surprisingly decent gear for not a lot of money.
 
The one thing I can tell you with certainty is you WON'T like the degradation in coverage from your 54G. Those old devices were specifically designed for maximum coverage, because at the time that was the most important trait. Now all devices are designed with density and speed in mind, rather than absolute range. All that means is that you might need to get multiple APs to cover what you're covering with a single AP now. The good news is that also means you will have additional speed benefits because having more APs means less clients per AP.

The Linksys you have is not the same Linksys of now. Cisco bought them out a while ago, and stripped them of features to market them as residential devices. I personally wouldn't recommend buying anything Linksys these days, but others might have been fine with them.

I second iroc409's comment that I've been buying more and more TP-Link stuff if I need it on the cheap. I've been happy with the stuff I have purchased, but it's usually for a family member who needs to connect one device via wireless so they aren't exactly getting taxed.

If you liked DD-WRT, then I would probably suggest going with real hardware instead. There's nothing wrong with DD-WRT, but you're trying to work around the fact that you bought something with a limited feature set and are relying on a 3rd party to make it better. Just about every 3rd or 4th post here is about Ubiquiti Unifi APs, and I think you'd be much happier with those than buying another SOHO device and flashing it. For access points the AC Lites are a solid option. They actually have quite good coverage despite having internal antennas, and have been a solid device for me. I've used Lites and Pros in different scenarios and both work well.

https://www.ui.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-lite/

Keep in mind that is only an access point. It's not a router. Ubiquiti also offers a device called the EdgeRouter-X which pairs well with the AC Lite. You can use one POE brick to power the ER-X, and the plug your AP into port 4 and pass through POE power to the AP as well. So all you need to do is simply run a wire somewhere, and both data and power go to the AP over a single cable. It makes mounting it fairly trivial if you have access to an attic or basement / crawl where you can pull a wire to put the AP into a better location. They also sell a security gateway, which may or may not have additional features you would be interested in. If neither of those tickle your fancy, you can move up to a mini itx system running one of the many software firewalls like PFSense (They also sell appliances), Sophos UTM, or some other option. For what you're planning on doing in the future I'd probably lean toward an ER-X or some type of desktop on PFSense. I've ran both of these and they are low maintenance. Unlike Soho equipment I'm never having to reset either of these because something just stops working.

If you're not interested in any of that, you could try looking at something like the TP-Link Archer series, or maybe even their Deco series. It might be possible that even in their stock form that might tick most of the boxes, but they obviously won't be nearly as customizable unless to find if they can be flashed to DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc.

The final point you mentioned was long range Wifi. Uqbuiti has a bit of a confusing site for trying to find options, but they do sell long range Wifi Bridge devices. One option is buying a pair of Nanobeam AC Gen 2's. They are basically small satellite dishes designed for point to point links.

https://store.ui.com/products/nanobeam-5ac-gen2?_pos=1&_sid=7ac35a86a&_ss=r
 
This https://www.flyteccomputers.com/product/20818/Ubiquiti-PowerBeam-ac-PBE-5AC-500-4Units-5GHz-airMAX-Bridge-25km-450Mbps-25km-2Pack- is the leading prospect for the bridge link.
The leading router, which will be in my house, is probably the critical one. I'm not concerned with wireless range. My house is not large. The router is centrally located in the basement. There's a certain locational security factor that way, in that everywhere inside my house gets good signal, but my yard and outside does not ( I like it that way, I have no use for wifi in the yard, and it can't be hacked without signal). Probably a key thing I will need is the ability to set up something larger than a class C subnet. I'm thinking of setting the routers at the distant home and office to have their own distinct subnet, running their own DHCP servers on that class C subnet.
 
I know people love Ubiquiti, but it seems to be set up more towards getting people (companies) pulled into their Ecosystem. Their APs seem underpowered and overpriced to me.
What I run is a Mikrotik RB750 https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-reviews/33140-microtik-rb750gr3-hex-router-reviewed. I have not had the packet loss issues mentioned, but then I don't run VPN tunnels. The router itself is as simple or complex as the person wants to make it. I then got a separate AP, which can carry signal across a 2 story(with a basement) 3600 square foot house. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071KGLXVG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1.
I like having router separate from AP, as I can upgrade/change either at my own leisure.
 
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Unifi works well. I like the intergration and ease of use. Solid mobile app, good amount of tweaking. One thing that I like is there new security cameras and intergration. So if you plan to add security cameras consider unifi gear.
 
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