I'm in the process of moving to a place that has fiberoptic internet built in. It's rated at 1000mbps speed. The company has recommended the following routers...any experience or more knowledge on them? ASUS RT-AC3200+ ASUS RT-AC5300 Netgear Nighthawk X6 R8000 TP-Link Talon AD7200 Thank you in advance for any suggestions!
In all cases, the fiber comes in to some sort of modem. And from the modem, you have an Ethernet cable. The first order of business is getting a router that has a gigabit wan port. Most new stuff does. You can use the mentioned routers if you want, I'm sure they would all work. However, at some point, I gave up on residential and consumer home routers. This is entirely up to you, you can go with the recommended ones (the Asus stuff is decent). But let me make a recommendation... Ubiquiti Security Gateway - router Ubiquiti 8 port PoE switch Ubiquiti AP Pro - WiFi access point. You're going to spend about $400 here. But the USG will provide you with security controls as well as advanced routing options, along with two subnettable LAN ports in case you want/need to segregate traffic. The WiFi AP has a 3x3 MIMO multi channel antenna, and you can create multiple SSIDs via the USG. The PoE switch will enable you to easily add additional APs for wifi capacity down the road. And the controller management software server can be run on a raspberry pi. It is more pro-grade stuff, but you are dealing with some high level bandwidth here. 1gbps can be unruly when you really start messing around with your own home infrastructure.
I second Ubiquiti. I use Ubiquiti gear at home and have deployed their stuff to multiple clients. The Unifi line is only a notch or two above consumer grade as far as knowledge needed to configure it, but pro quality. And SO much more stable. A mild learning curve but if you're savvy, it's slick. The centralized Unifi controller makes it easy to manage as many Unifi devices as you want from a single interface on your computer or using a CloudKey. (Or Raspberry Pi apparently!) I don't have or need significant bandwidth at home, so I just use an Edgerouter X and an AP-AC-LR.
All of this. I finally switched over to Unifi stuff myself. It is almost a addiction at this point. Then the whole system comes down to what do you want out of it. Do you want everything centralized, centralized storage, camera systems, etc. If you are looking to just sling wifi everywhere and have no further plans, any of those routers will work. If you are looking for a solid system that you can expand and twist into a complete centralized network, Unifi is the way to go.
Beautifully done. Nice and clean. I think the beauty of Ubiquiti stuff is that it lets you have better than the usual consumer grade networking, with professional level tools, for way less than commercial grade costs. If anyone is considering going down this route, I would be more than happy to lend some knowledge in getting it set up correctly initially. Really, the most difficult part is figuring out how you're going to run the Unifi Controller server. Raspberry Pi is popular. I run mine on a VM on the development server, mainly because it requires very little in teh way of hardware resources, and my dev server has a TON of resources to spare. But once the basics are plugged in and set up, it requires very little in the way of care and feeding, and it is ROCK SOLID STABLE. The majority of the setup is just plug and play after that.
I am also more than willing to help get things setup if needed. I originally started off with just the USG, 8 port switch and a AC lite running and a raspberry pi. I am up to 3 switches, 3 APs and a couple of cameras running on the cloudkey gen2+.
"Rigid" lol. OP, sounds like you have plenty of resources in this thread if you want to try some Ubiquiti gear. I guess if you have any questions, just post in this thread and one of us can respond.
Thanks for all of the responses! I think I understood most of it! Maybe a little more context... I'm moving into a loft Downtown St. Paul. It's not huge, and I am not doing anything heavy duty on-the-line. Primary uses are streaming services, "surfing" and some light gaming. Someday I'd love to learn and know enough to have one these Ubiquiti setups, but I am not sure how necessary that is for my needs/uses. That being said, I'll look in to the recommended models, and hopefully land somewhere later today! @idget Your suggestion sums up my knowledge of routers in general. @tangledupinblu you know that's already in the arsenal!
If that's the case, you don't need anything more powerful than the basic ubiquiti router. We only recommend them because we have a better track record with them than any of the other ones... And trust me, @readymix and I have tried pretty much all of the mainstream ones. If he says get that one, he means it
The Ubiquiti stuff is great, and if you really needed the bandwidth, it's about the most cost effective way to really support 1G throughput. But if it's just you, unless you're doing major, major data movement, it's not really necessary to get every last bit per second out of that thing. We've got 1G fiber, frequently have 4 HD video streams and online games running simultaneously, and the fact is, we rarely come near using 1/4 of our bandwidth. If it was a house, the UniFi stuff would be great for coverage, but it's overkill in this case. An AmpliFi Instant is probably more than enough for this situation, and a lot more newb-friendly. But if you're going to go full-nerd, you can go way down the Ubiquiti rabbit hole. I have unboxed far too many white and blue boxes.
Fwiw, I have the Netgear Nighthawk X6 R8000 and its fairly user friendly with the different apps and access methods, provided good stable speeds and had great connection distances and penetration through walls, ymmv.
Did we just get a glimpse at MNSubaru's home, @WRX1 As a side note, I had a bunch of NOS Ubiquity gear from my last job and ALMOST deployed it, but then, I realized, if it goes down, my wife will kill me trying to walk her through the steps to reboot everything.. Google Wifi mesh it was. +1 for a great product and ecosystem you can build off of.
I wouldn't disagree with that assessment either, with that said, Amazon has had a few flash sales on it, as has Best Buy (I got mine for less than half the regular retail price at BB with price matching).
Thanks all for the input, and advice! This is all over my head in many ways too, so thanks for the schooling! After reading up a little more, knowing that I'm in a 1025 sq ft loft, and that I am using it in a very basic consumer way (streaming, light gaming, and surfing), I ended up going with the TP-Link Archer c2300. I looked at the Nighthawks (particularly the 8000 model) but even on sale at $250 (Target), I couldn't justify that money based on my use. The TP-Link was on sale for $140, (the "recommended" model from Arvig was only $10 less, but this one I think is a hair better). Super easy install, and so far so good!
