Hey there,
I hope I have not already asked this question. In my quest to do separates I opted to retire my R7800 in place of an EdgeRouter 4.
I use an Orbi as an Access Point/Mesh, so the wifi on the R7800 would be turned off. I do have QoS turned on as well.
The question is .. did I waste money by buying an ER-4, when the R7800 would have been fine as a router (no wifi) with QoS? Thats pretty much all I use on a router is QoS (aside from DHCP etc)
Thanks
Mark
yes you will waste money, there are much better routers than the ER-4. the edgerouters are a gimmick, configurable routers with the same performance as current consumer routers only with better hardware acceleration support. There are much much better routers than the ER-4 like mikrotik, pfsense and others that can do so much more without performance penalties faced by edgerouters.
Consider your needs as well and remember that edgerouters hate QoS when it comes to performance. Pfsense however if using a x86 CPU will chew through QoS with a lot of performance (just dependent on your CPU) and better security too.
QoS is a major weakpoint of all edgerouters, their performance drops are big, many owners make an excuse like (oh i have gigabit internet, i dont need QoS) to justify owning one, well i own the ERPRO and mikrotik, and mikrotik is leagues ahead of ubiquiti in routers, the only difference is that you can install other things on edgerouters like a regular linux box. i still wouldnt recommend it if you need high performance QoS. You will find that ubiquiti never posts performance about their routers for QoS, in a way majorly misleading their customers. If the ER-4 maxes out your internet for QoS and has CPU to spare then it wont be a waste of money. I use a router for a lot more things than just QoS and DHCP, i use it to control my network, for instance being able to have proxy caches (consider setting up nginx proxy cache which works with many applications, even steam as you're also doing QoS), forcing the use of the router's DNS (chrome and mobiles have hardcoded DNS, its a good security measure but easily bypassed on the network)
Your router does more than just DHCP and QoS, it does DNS, it can act as a NTP server for your network, it can be a mini linux box (depends on router), it can be a basic NAS (dont recommend) but most important is the control you get to add features to your network, like if you want to run an IDS, IPS or even network firewall/AV.
So pick a router that fits your use case best. Mention your WAN speeds so that we can recommend a router that can do QoS at those speeds. I do know the CCR1036 from mikrotik with 10G ports has the CPU power to do QoS at line rate, beating the edgerouter with 8 10Gb/s ports in QoS performance at the same price. Some consumer routers have hardware acceleration for QoS but also limits your configurability of QoS. When you configure QoS in detail and properly, the results are much better, but if you need a plug and play solution, there are better consumer routers for that. If you have a decent skill for networking, consider pfsense as its not as hard to set up and understand as mikrotik.
the most performance out of the Edgerouter line series is 100Mb/s of software processing per core at 1.2Ghz. That means the old ERPRO will do QoS at 200Mb/s at best. 1 mikrotik CCR core at 1.2Ghz will do 500Mb/s of QoS. Despite both routers being based on similar architectures, mikrotik's edge in software gives it better performance.
