I’m shopping for a new router and I would prefer something from a company that isn’t stealing my data and spying on me at every opportunity.
I live in a small house, 1100ish square feet. I have 8 wifi cameras, 6 computers (two are for work), a handful of phones and tablets, nearly 50 lights and other smart devices, and lastly I have 10 Sonos wifi speakers. I would also strongly prefer something that is wall or ceiling mountable.
My current router is buckling and can’t handle the load. I would very much appreciate any advice or recommendations you can offer me while I’m shopping!
What’s your current router? What is the symptom you’re experiencing?
With that much stuff connected you absolutely have to be doing some kind of subnetting and traffic shaping.
If you’re pretty far out from your neighbors then you can use different wireless aps to make up the backbone of the subnets. If you’re close enough to the neighbors to see their networks in a site survey then there may not be enough spectrum to do that.
I got a few routers from this company last year, set them up as bridges connecting multiple structures. What I liked most about them is that they ran openwrt that I could compile myself.
the spying happens at the ISP server level, your router won’t change that
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order
Look into trustworthy VPNs or using Tor to hopefully prevent your internet traffic from being spied on
yeah
although many brands are so full of security holes it might be both. And while I haven’t bought a router in a while it wouldn’t shock me if some of the bargain brands are doing data collection
Asus is my go-to. Very reliable (2-year warranty) the software is powerful and based on an open source project and there are several third party options that you can load on it. They can also do mesh networking. For your number of device I would get something pretty powerful, probably at least an ax5400. I would also suggest replacing your smart devices with zigbee devices, so they won’t be on your wifi and they will use far less power.
If you want to fully control your router, look into Mikrotik.
Ubiquity is okayish, but does need you to set up a Unifi center, which can manage multiple routers simultaneously. But they are less flexible than Mikrotik.
But, as others have mentioned, your ISP is the issue. If you go with Mikrotik, you can set DNSs to your custom set (eg. Use CloudFlare or FreeDNS) and directly install VPN (Wireguard or IPsec or OpenVpn) and route all your traffic through that.
My suggestion: if you have a bit of networking knowledge or want to learn, go with Mikrotik. If you’re more “high level, I just want stuff to automatically work”, pick Ubiquity.
You have not mentioned how all of these devices are connected, but if it’s mostly wired (which I would always suggest due to security and speed), you’ll need a switch as well.
You can also combine several Unifi WiFi access points with a Mikrotik router as an edge device. This should give you enough coverage and wireless bandwidth for all non-cable connected devices.
Note that Mikrotik VLAN setup is kinda weird if you’re looking to get broad experience. I thought I had lost all my networking knowledge the first time I needed to set it up
If you are technically minded a hardware firewall/router running opnsense has been awesome for me. I use a ubiquiti access point with it, but you could use whatever you wanted to.
The flexibility is amazing and I don’t have issues with my router choking on traffic anymore.
Just an option to consider, not really related to load: there are some wired-only routers out there that are sometimes a bit cheaper (and the actual network router part of a router/wi-fi setup doesn’t need to be very fancy). Then you can buy a separate wireless access point (AP). Usually that means the AP is more expensive, but you can buy Wi-Fi “range extenders” that can act as an access point and are cheap. Although you’d want to confirm that it can act as an AP. That allows you to divorce upgrading wifi from upgrading the router. Might even consider using your current router, with the wifi disabled, with the AP plugged into it. Although a lot of APs use power over ethernet (PoE), so that could make it slightly more complex and costly.
If devices are spread out, you can do mesh wifi where there are multiple wifi access points. But I assume that probably wouldn’t help with interference (make it worse since it’s just more wi-fi devices communicating). You might just have too many devices causing interference. I guess you would want an access point that at least has whatever the fanciest modulation is, like “MU-MIMO” or whatever. I guess an AP/router with 4+ antennas would be better?
Like here’s an AP: https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Wireless-Beamforming-Multi-SSID-TL-WA1201/dp/B0CNSCVXZN
It’s Wi-Fi 6, so it does not support the 6 GHz band (Wi-Fi 6e) which is fine, not sure if you have any 6 GHz capable devices. Looks like it also comes with a PoE injector.
with a router like https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Balancing-Bandwidth-Management-Monitoring/dp/B0D934MCV4
