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The best side effect of buying proper WiFi gear is breaking up what is for most people usually an all-in-one device into devices - modem, router, access point -
by nikcub 10y ago
The best side effect of buying proper WiFi gear is breaking up what is for most people usually an all-in-one device into devices - modem, router, access point - that are dedicated to each distinct task.
The high-end gear many get for running open firmware can get expensive. It isn't hard to spend less money on dedicated devices and get better performance.
What I spent on an EdgeRouter, AP AC Pro and a good managed switch is less than what the top recommendation from this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113766
cost - $250 for the Linksys EA8500 vs $130 + $50 for the UniFi setup and add $50 for a TP-Link switch.
I now want to get a bit fancier with the router - so i'm swapping it out for an eBay sourced Cisco or similar (I want dual WAN and failover, along with routing some traffic over VPN's) - still cost the same but much better (and a setup that is applicable up to 100+ users)
- jon-wood 10y agoWhich Edgerouter did you get, because at the firmware level its quite capable of WAN failover and routing over VPNs if you've got enough ethernet ports on it.
- nikcub 10y agoI got the X - added it to my shopping basket as an afterthought and ended up using it as my primary WAN router (replacing pfSense on VMWare ESXi) I had someone tell me on Twitter to try out the better models because there is a lot you can do with them, and i've seen references to it before on other forums (it seems it is common now to do VPN routing setups on EdgeRouters) I might give it a go - I do like trying different things out to get some experience across diff products