Ok the journey to replace my old tp-link 470+ router took almost a month of research and testing. Here is what I found out and I really hope this helps someone save a bit of time. I was a network administrator over 20 years ago. I do not consider myself an expert by a long shot. I have two 4 Mbps DSL lines entering the house (I am not close to any city). I have an email server, file server and our house is extremely automated. There are only 2 of us in the home but myself and my wife are avid gamers. We stream most of our tv/movie content. Our workout room is all connected with video instructors. I have both mac laptops and tablets, windows gaming laptops, VOIP, Xbox and Linux boxes all running off this network. Daily I am downloading 20-100gig games in the background. I also have a mesh wifi covering the 3 floors of the house and the grounds outside of the home. This gives you and idea of what my challenges are.
I want to get use of the full 8 Mbps bandwidth for downloads then scale back so we can watch a movie or play a game or listen to music throughout the home all while the game keeps downloading but at a slower speed. When we are not using the network I would like it to speed back up and use the full 8 Mbps again.
I tested an Ubiquiti edgerouter 4, TP-Link TL-R600VPN V4, pfsense on an old water-cooled 3ghz gaming computer and on a protectli vault 4 port quad core. Here is what I experienced.
First test was the tp-link. It was running in about 20 minutes from when I took it out of the box with the email server port forwarded. I was able to access my email server outside the house and inside even with pointing our phones to the no-ip dynamic DNS address (kind of like a loopback or NAT reflection). It simply worked. But monitoring is near non-existent so I would need a secondary network monitor and SMS connect which it supports but I figured I would test some other routers. It was so simple to setup including QOS that I kept coming back to use this router as the gold standard setup.
Second, I spent a little over a week with the edgerouter 4. It gets great reviews, and the network monitoring was the best of the bunch for me with PfSense a close second and tp-link at near non-existent monitoring/graphing traffic. I always knew what was going on and what the edgerouter was doing with its excellent dashboard. After a few days and many hundreds of pages of reading on forums and chatting with folks as the edgerouter has a very helpful community I got it up and running with both wans and the email server. But gaming was not great. Buffer lag and bloat and constant disconnects were simply just unacceptable and after a week I threw in the towel. Interesting the first-person shooters were not the only issue but Guildwars 2 would just drop either myself or my wife mid adventure 3-4 times in an hour and at other times we could go a complete hour before one of use was dropped. This never happened with the tp-link 470T+ in 4 years, the PfSense or the TP-Link TL-R600VPN. It was only the edgerouter. I had to box up the edgerouter and stop all further work with it.
The last router(s) I tested was pfSense with both an old 3ghz gaming box and a protectli 4 port fanless box. I will say the PfSense was the my favorite of all interface and the things that the software can do is incredible. It look less than an hour to download and get the box up and running on my old pc. I purchased a dual port intel nic from amazon and with the nic already on the motherboard I was able to connect 2 dls lines and the local ethernet line. PfSense was completely free! Just the cost of the hardware you will need to run it. After tweaking it for a week I got the load balancing working and the QOS dialed in, performing better than the TP-link TL-R600VPN. I was able to get the most bandwidth with pfSense but I never was able to get my mail server working quite right. I thought the issue was my old gaming computer and I purchased a protectli fanless box – the quality is top notch and installing PfSense took just a few minutes. I can’t say enough about the little box and its capabilities. I think it only used 20W total, so it was not a huge power consumer as the gaming rig/router was. But without getting PfSense working I had to abandon the box. As I recall I spent $350 on the box so it became the most expensive router of the 4 tested.
Conclusion – I ended up going back to the TP-Link TL-R600VPN. Why? Well it was the lowest power used, it had 5 lan ports, QOS and load balancing. Its port forwarding and virtual servers work great but most of all everything work right out of the box. I mean everything. Dynamic DNS was a breeze to setup. I am serious when I say it was less than 20 min to get the whole router up and running. I realize I could have spent another couple of days or weeks getting the other routers to work but I finally decided why? This is a home network, I have learned all I wanted to at this point and I had a router that simply worked out of the box for a multi WAN install. Is it perfect – no. Can I monitor the network from its own interface – no!
I don’t work for any of these folks and I am not in the tech industry. I am a purchasing manager so trust me there will be many who can do better at setting these up but this is my experience and like many others with a reasonable non-professional understanding of networking this review is intended for you.
| Standing screen display size | 8.2 Inches |
|---|---|
| RAM | 64 GB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11n |
