A home router that supports upnp

[Karl Erik Jessen]

I am considering a new wired router (because of home geography router an wireless accesspoint are separate)
Situation is
- WAN side: 100/100 Gbit fiber with possible upgrade to 1000/1000 Gbit
- LAN with
- 3 stationary MAC/PC
- 3 laptops
- arround 6 iphones/ipads
- arround 3 - 5 cromecast, AppleTV, settopboxes etc.
- heavy use of Dropbox and Google Drive

I have been considdering a Netgear FVS336G-300, as it seems to have a pretty good throughput LAN-to-WAN ans visa-versa.

Form prior experience I want to be sure that upnp works on my router (Currently I have a Linksys LRT214; it is equipped with upnp according to datasheet, but does not work correctly when upnp are enabled)

So:
Can anyone confirm, that FVS336G-300 actually works with upnp enabled?

/Karl Erik Jessen
Farum
Denmark

 

[Trip]

Hi Karl. upnp may actually work on the FVS, I'm not sure, but as long you're looking at in $250-300 USD segment, I think you'll find Netgear's SMB firewall stuff is not the greatest feedback-wise. Even Cisco's RV series would be a better bet, and they're still regarded to be somewhat middling by many...

Best bang for your buck, if you have the skill and don't need support, would be a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 8 or ER-Pro, or Mikrotik RB1100AHx2 or CCR-1009. Another option would be an open-source firewall build done on a cheap multi-nic box, either a leftover or something small and low-power from AliExpress, etc.

If you need something more approachable and well-supported, perhaps a Peplink Balance One Core (good for 500-ish mb/s), or a UTM appliance with support available as an add-on. There are also pre-built pfsense, untangle and vyatta boxes sold with a bit of support by VARs like NexGen. Pricey options, all of the above, but many would argue worth it.

 

[System Error Message]

almost every router now has upnp, the difference is in the implementation.
Also your WAN speeds, 100Gb/s to 1Tb/s

I can vouch from experience that mikrotik's upnp implementation depends on the user's configuration so you would have to configure it.

peplinks are the easiest when you want to bond VPN links or bond multiple WANs easily. However their VPN over bonded links only work if you have a peplink router at the other end. They have a lot of support and are one of the priciest options.

Dont go for the cisco RV series because. Aside from a lot of horror stories, only Ubiquiti has the most stable implementation of that CPU/platform.

 

[RMerlin]

Dont go for the cisco RV series because. Aside from a lot of horror stories, only Ubiquiti has the most stable implementation of that CPU/platform.

Did the quality drop in the latter revisions? I've sold a few over the years (back when they were still using Fast Ethernet), including one customer relying on it for failover. It was an RV042, it always worked flawlessly for them back then. (since then the customer was bought by a new owner, who moved them to their own corporate network, so the RV042 is no longer in use).

 

[System Error Message]

Did the quality drop in the latter revisions? I've sold a few over the years (back when they were still using Fast Ethernet), including one customer relying on it for failover. It was an RV042, it always worked flawlessly for them back then. (since then the customer was bought by a new owner, who moved them to their own corporate network, so the RV042 is no longer in use).

Its because they had the same quality as a typical consumer router. Theres no point paying more for something of the same quality. The only reason to go for them back than was because consumer routers didnt natively support VPN. People paid more for it expecting cisco quality when it was just the same as a consumer router and used it for their businesses.

 

[Cloud200]

Did the quality drop in the latter revisions? I've sold a few over the years (back when they were still using Fast Ethernet), including one customer relying on it for failover. It was an RV042, it always worked flawlessly for them back then. (since then the customer was bought by a new owner, who moved them to their own corporate network, so the RV042 is no longer in use).

The Linksys RV042 was great.
The Cisco RV series was not so great.
Hardware quality kept dropping on every new revision, as well as more and more bugs showing up in the firmware.
As a consulting company we simply stopped using them if we get too many "unplug and plug back in" to solve an issue tickets.
As an outlier we do have a client with a pair of RV320 and RV325 with an uptime on a VPN link for over a year.

 

[Trip]

In my experience, the 320 and 325 get a passing grade only as of the last firmware revision, but other than those two, I tend to stay away from the rest of the series and typically steer clients towards Peplink, UTMs or pre-built pFsense boxes if they want to self-administrate; I'll only do more technical embedded/purpose-built stuff (big-boy Cisco, Juniper, etc) if contract-based support can be provisioned into the budget.

For el-cheapo projects, one might as well buy a consumer box and load an open-source firmware. I know Atheros+OpenWRT or Broadcom+Tomato/DD-WRT are two good combinations. FleaBay and certified-used vendors are always an option as well, but I'm always incredibly leary when it comes to buying a box that already has however many hours of heat and use under its belt...

 

[RMerlin]

Its because they had the same quality as a typical consumer router. Theres no point paying more for something of the same quality. The only reason to go for them back than was because consumer routers didnt natively support VPN. People paid more for it expecting cisco quality when it was just the same as a consumer router and used it for their businesses.

Gotcha. Those to whom I sold one were needing either a basic PPTP server for 1-2 simultaneous users, or Dual WAN. They had between 4 and 10 employees on average.

 

[coxhaus]

What specifically does not work with UPNP? Maybe there is a patch or someone on this site has idea if we can figure out what does not work.

 

[RMerlin]

Often, UPnP appears to not work because your modem also runs its own firewall, preventing any port forwarded on your router to be exposed to the WAN. Make sure you double check that your modem is in bridged mode.

Also, note that some UPnP implementation will refuse to forward ports below 1024 by default, for increased security.