I’m gonna be moving into a new place soon and I’ll be setting up the Internet there. I want to experiment with setting up a local network with static IPs just for learning and fun, so I want my own router. I don’t want something hard to use because other people will be using the internet from it too. I don’t really know what the router market looks like, and I don’t want to support Reddit, so I’m asking here.
Ideally, this router would:
- Be under $150 (but I might be willing to go a bit higher)
- Be easily purchasable (no AliExpress specials)
- Not sell data to corporations
- Have a long life, ideally through easily set-up open source firmware but reputable proprietary is fine
- Have good enough antennas to propagate signal across a small house
- Support up to 500Mb/s sustained speeds
What do you think? Thank you for your help!
I know there are a lot of recommendations here, but I can provide some insight as someone who has been looking into this heavily for the past several months.
I will start by saying that the GL.iNet Flint 2 running OpenWrt is probably going to be your best option. It meets your price point and concerns. The Flint 3 is an upgrade that just came out that could also be considered, but is currently at $190. I currently have the Flint 2 running at my mom’s house providing her network coverage. It’s a nice all in one device and I believe she’s running a 500Mbps service.
Some of the other responses here mention OPNSense. That’s what I’m running right now as a virtual machine. I’m using TP-Link Omada access points for Wi-Fi coverage. OPNSense or PFSense might be a bit much to start. They are good options, but can get rather advanced quickly and still require a method to provide Wi-Fi. I’d been looking at replacements heavily lately, but decided to stick with OPNSense (I just have to migrate it from running on VMware ESXi to Proxmox now).
Just a thought if you are interested. VMware let’s you export the data and then proxmox will read that exported data to a qcow file