Well it is good that you are happy with the Ubnt stuff. But I still want to question your claims. It is faster? How. When I test the RT-AC86U on a fiber connection we have a ping time around 3-4 ms. Is the Ubnt stuff faster and can a human even detect that?
More stable? The last RT-AC86U I installed is up on its 45 day and still going strong. No errors or anything.
And it seems you are giving up QoS and IPS. Have you tested the performance with these features enabled.
Hehe. Yes you probably feel this way but you will find it very hard to document.
No but you still claim a more stable and faster setup (with the compromise that you are giving up QoS and IPS). But you cannot really back this up with numbers. So its a arbitrary feel and not something measurable. And now you go around and praise Ubiquiti with these none-tangible arguments. Not to burst your bubble but that but doesn't it sound a bit cult-ish?
Numbers like what? iperf3, speedtest.net, SMB transfer speeds?
Synthetic benchmarks or created traffic is hardly a "real world" test.
Just using things, surfing the web, using youtube, streaming netflix/hulu etc...is real world.
The Asus has never felt this fast or smooth. Web pages load instantly, Youtube buffers fill instantly and I can seek instantly with no delay or buffering, even with 4K videos. The Asus, would have a slight lag, and over time, a little as a month or as long as a few months, things would slow or lag a bit. I never went more than 3 months or so before feeling I needed to power cycle the Asus, and that goes for every router I have had and remotely managed for others. (The 68U my folks have, needs to be rebooted every 45 days or so else they complain things are slow and the GUI of the router barley loads at that point as well). Human perception and raw experience is a valid argument.
I can 100% say that wifi is improved. The Unifi can do many more things than the Asus or any consumer AP can do and it is in a different class of AP entirely...period. So it is not a fair comparison. Still, you can not deny the use-fullness of access to all 5ghz channels, the increased range and signal strength, and overall throughput available of 200+ clients. And for raw numbers, they are far better on every wifi device in my home as they now get full signal everywhere. My laptop and phone stays at 866 link rate everywhere, and will even work with a usable signal 2x as far away as when it was the Asus AP doing things, even with their "Beamforming" they advertise. Speed tests, (speedtest.net or the custom one by my ISP) max out my phones wifi chip each time. Here are some numbers for you (326/704 Unifi , 286/317 Asus) Pixel 3. Tested in same room as AP.
(I am not certain as to why I thought I was getting 60 to 70MBs file transfer speeds over SMB WLAN to LAN with the Asus alone....I have tried to replicate that again, however, I can not. Everything I have read says that I am already maxing out my 2x2 and 3x3 clients max bandwidth already at my current tests.)
As far as L3 routing goes, the pings are a bit lower when i run speedtest.net on severs further away, i did observe. One thing that is consistent, the speedtest server local to me, by my ISP, would always show 1-2MS ping with the Asus, now, it frequently shows less than 0 in its live testing,with it rounding up to 0 in the end. A few test it went up to 1, but I have yet to see it go above 1.
More numbers....CPU usage on the ER never goes about 10% when I am maxing out my connection even with multiple machines running a speedtest. The Asus, would max out its core 1 and use about 75% core 2 when ruining the same tests. RAM is also double on the ER (1GB). That only stays in the 25% range of used, the Asus often was in the 60% used area, and more when there was that memory leak bug for a while.
LAN to LAN activity, is done through the switch, not router, so there is nothing to compare there.
I never found QOS useful. It is over hyped and misunderstood what it does and when it should be used. I have messed with it and found zero improvements with it enabled on the Asus. . I do not have that many devices. Second, QOS is known to disable hardware offloading. In Asus case, it did disable something, Runner, or Flow Control, i don't recall exactly what they call it or use, but you can see it disabled on the system status page I do know. And with a 1Gig WAN pipe to make use of, I always have the bandwith available, so QOS is not needed. Infact, things were slower when I had QOS enabled, in my testing while back, when i was messing around with it. and that was mensurable in speedtests, but i did not save those results.
Even in a few homes I remotely manage, with far more devices and network traffic than my own home, QOS never seemed to do anything for them, in fact, i did experiment, remotely activating QOS for a while, then deactivating it, without the users knowing. I did get told by 2 different people form different sites that things were slower to them at times, then faster, which coincided with having QOS on, vs off. Was "better" off it seems. But i dont have any numbers or data to really prove on or off is better, just the users blind perception which u can take as you wish.
The ER does have SmartQues/QOS, but I have not messed with that....it is far more complicated to setup that the stupid easy GUI Asus setup.
IPS/IDS....typical home user does not really need this honestly. Unless they are running some public open server 24/7 that would be a target. I never had any hits or detections with Asus AI Protect systems in 6 years(?) however long that feature first came out. I don't think the EdgeRouter series has IPS/IDS, that is the Unifi Security Gateway devices that do. Even so, the ER firewall is block/drop everything by default. It is also a completely different core firewall and firmware implantation than Asus. I can't recall the name/term, but it is used but Enterprise firewalls, Cisco, SonicWall, etc. But its own design, is more robust than any consumer router has, so I have read. I don't really know how one goes about "testing" the two products. I am not about to hire a white hat hacker to do penetration testing to compare the Asus and ER.
Centralized management software server, is something that the Asus cant touch. Unifi and UMNS give SO much info and power/control and especially monitoring and alerting, it is insane and way overkill for what I need or even wanted.
And also, the raw abilities of the ER, trump the Asus or any consumer router....period. The GUI is ugly, but powerful, and with the CLI or manual config file ability for those who really know what they are doing, far outclasses the Asus. Not that I personally can use this it full ability, but many users can.
The built in DPI is pretty much the same thing you get with Asus Traffic Analyzer, and both are HW offloaded.
Anywho, the only thing I can not comment on at this point, is longevity. Only had this complete setup for a couple days now. I also just updated and rebooted the ER4 to the recently released v2 firmware branch.
