What’s the next router to consider?

[Candurin]

Clearly, I want to stay in the Voxel infrastructure.

What would be the next router to consider? Netgear Orbi?

With the growing number of devices, IoT, the fact we have 1.2gb speed internet at home now, etc.

My two R7800s are still doing great and humming along, but, I know I’m not too far off from an upgrade.

@Voxel Any thoughts to what you plan on supporting in the future?

 

[RMinNJ]

With NG offering only 90 days of support and usually buggy firmware where they ignore mass pleas for help on their forums I find it hard to purchase any of their network products . Yes Voxel would mandatory.

 

[Candurin]

Agreed. This is why I’m anticipating which NG routers voxel will support moving forward

 

[LeKeiser]

Clearly, I want to stay in the Voxel infrastructure.

What would be the next router to consider? Netgear Orbi?

With the growing number of devices, IoT, the fact we have 1.2gb speed internet at home now, etc.

My two R7800s are still doing great and humming along, but, I know I’m not too far off from an upgrade.

@Voxel Any thoughts to what you plan on supporting in the future?

Hello,

Curious to find out why? Our R7800s are still the best routers around. I don't know any router that offer more than 1GB on the WAN port anyway, so...

 

[Candurin]

The newer NG Orbi routers support multi-gig (2.5gb) on the WAN port.

 

[LeKeiser]

Really? It's an aggregation? Or just one port?

 

[primitivo]

Very good question. I am running R9000 but it seems to me Netgear is quietly discontinuing this 4-year old router? It is out of stocks in many places, in UK the limited pieces are retailing at its original price. I have never seen a router to retain such a good price value for such a long time.

Question is rather what is next after R9000? Perhaps @Voxel can say something and his plans to support upcoming models?

 

[microchip]

Voxel seems to prefer Qualcomm-based routers/Orbi systems. If he's to move on and doesn't change his mind, I'd recommend the RAX120 which is the only Qualcomm-based AX pure router NG offers at the moment. I guess you can do more/it's more flexible firmware-wise with Qualcomm routers as QCA uses OpenWrt as its base for the firmware

 

[primitivo]

Voxel seems to prefer Qualcomm-based routers/Orbi systems. If he's to move on and doesn't change his mind, I'd recommend the RAX120 which is the only Qualcomm-based AX pure router NG offers at the moment. I guess you can do more/it's more flexible firmware-wise with Qualcomm routers as QCA uses OpenWrt as its base for the firmware

2.2GHz quad-core CPU, that would finally be a nice upgrade beyond 1.7-1.8GHz routers.

@Voxel could you confirm your future firmware based interest in RAX120?

 

[avtella]

GHz isn’t always the best measure of performance. If purely going by the CPU cores, the 4 ARM Cortex A15 cores in the R9000 even at 1.7 GHz are actually probably still a little more powerful than the 2.2 GHz Cortex A53 cores in the RAX120. The A72 is actually the a high performance core successor to the A15 and A57.
The A53 is a more of a successor to the A7 lo power/efficiency cores. More commonly in ARMs big.little architecture like seen in phones you’d see combination of both high performance and low power cores, ie A57s/A72s paired with A53s/A55.

Having said that the newer QCA chip does have a much more effective crypto accelerator and some other enhancements and is if I recall built on a smaller node plus being an efficiency core on top of that it can probably sustain peak performance at lower temps. Probably a sensible decision as the A57 is probably overkill and the power draw / heat output is probably not worth it in a consumer networking device.

 

[Voxel]

I am sorry, I do not have enough time to react on all your SNB messages. I need a time to spend for my health care.

I really consider RAX120 as the next router to support. Not right now. And not very soon. So no sense to buy it because of my upcoming support. Qualcomm is preferred because of it is much more opensource so I have a space for optimization.

Having said that the newer QCA chip does have a much more effective crypto accelerator

Crypto. I am not sure that crypto accelerator is used at full power now (RAX120). Example is ORBI stock firmware, RBR50 or LBR20 does not matter: because of NG/DNI developer’s bug the hardware acceleration of OpenSSL (crypto device) just does not work. Still. But RAX120 CPU (ARMv8-A) itself is interesting if AES-NI crypto is supported by QCA SoC. As I hope. So this could provide even more good results in performance vs crypto accelerator. Because of PCI bottleneck (as a rule crypto accelerators are PCI devices).

Voxel.

 

[L&LD]

@Voxel, take all the time you need, health first! The forums and questions can wait.

Godspeed friend.

 

[Sizzlechest]

After my R7800 dies, I'm going to ditch the router and get a pfSense box.

I'll figure something else out for the wireless part.

 

[SwampKracker]

After my R7800 dies, I'm going to ditch the router and get a pfSense box.

I'll figure something else out for the wireless part.

Why wait for the R7800 to die? Setup your pfSense firewall now and use the R7800 as an access point.

 

[Sizzlechest]

Why wait for the R7800 to die? Setup your pfSense firewall now and use the R7800 as an access point.

I could. Voxel's firmware gives me all the capabilities that I need. I might as well wait until I need it. The performance of the psSense box will go up and prices will come down over time, so there's no reason to buy it now.

 

[SwampKracker]

I could. Voxel's firmware gives me all the capabilities that I need. I might as well wait until I need it. The performance of the psSense box will go up and prices will come down over time, so there's no reason to buy it now.

That is a good strategy.

However, you are not limited to the hardware sold by Netgate with pfSense pre-installed. If you notice in my signature, my pfSense firewall is an i5-3470 with 8GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD for storage. $200 for the refurbished Dell plus another $50 for the two Intel gigabit cards. Quite the beast for $250 compared to the hardware of any wireless router.

 

[Sizzlechest]

That is a good strategy.

However, you are not limited to the hardware sold by Netgate with pfSense pre-installed. If you notice in my signature, my pfSense firewall is an i5-3470 with 8GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD for storage. $200 for the refurbished Dell plus another $50 for the two Intel gigabit cards. Quite the beast for $250 compared to the hardware of any wireless router.

Yes, but the power consumption will also be a beast as well.

 

[RMinNJ]

Perhaps the new Synology AX Router?

Synology RT6600ax Review: One of the Best | Dong Knows Tech

Synology's first router in ages, the RT6600ax, proves one of the best Wi-Fi 6 machines, and the 5.9Ghz band support is a bonus. Get one today!

dongknows.com

 

[primitivo]

Perhaps the new Synology AX Router?

Synology RT6600ax Review: One of the Best | Dong Knows Tech

Synology's first router in ages, the RT6600ax, proves one of the best Wi-Fi 6 machines, and the 5.9Ghz band support is a bonus. Get one today!

dongknows.com

No CPU mentioned yet. I use RT2600ac at one place and it is a very good router with excellent frequently updated system, native DoH support etc. The only part missing is Wireguard support, which users have been asking for some time already, so maybe they will finally add it at some point.

 

[torstein]

How is the security features of the Synology routers compared to ASUS' routers, ie Synology's equivalent to aiProtection?