Home Router Suggestions

Waiting for the day…

You mean you have a /24?

No, no, talking about a home so /22.

Around 30 devices on my network, not all wireless devices!
The IoT devices like “smart” plugs, lights and switches use negligible bandwidth, but they do have an IP on the WiFI

My UniFi router says I have 21 Wireless and 30 Wired devices. :wink:

I got my existing router when it was the top choice, and it’s still going strong. Archer TP-Link C7 AC1750.

Had that one at home and so did another person at Tablo HQ. We had to ditch it in favor of something newer because we ran into issues with disconnections. We’ve seen various reports that a firmware and/or hardware problem limited the number of concurrent connections to 16 devices which is no bueno for folks who have larger families and are working/schooling from home.

For what it’s worth: I’m using a Netgear Nighthawk R7800 with 3rd party firmware on it (DD-WRT). Here’s my sad story if it helps:

Earlier in the year (when the pandemic fun started and kids + me were all working/schooling from home), I upgraded from my ISP’s router to a TP-Link Archer AX3000. However, as much as I wanted to like it, the parental control system wasn’t good. Specifically, it was really a 3rd party service that you were signing up for (if I remember right, it had a trial period)… but the issue was a request would come in, go to the third party to see if it was approved or not, then come back to your router… I’m not working on top secret stuff, but that was the first strike. I wanted direct access control on the router. The second strike was that to manage half of the settings (like Parental Controls) you HAD do use their phone app (which again connected through their cloud service, you weren’t connecting directly to the router). You could log into the router’s admin interface through your computer’s web browser, but half the settings you’d go to would say something like, “This setting is managed in our dumb phone app” (or something like that). In general I avoid loading phone apps if I can, particularly for things I want to set up and then forget about. And the third strike and killing blow was that the internet speed for the WHOLE ROUTER was cut in half when parental controls were enabled. I watched it happen… multiple speed tests before and after throwing the switch… and they all dropped by about half when parental controls were on.

So I returned it and got my money back (Amazon is awesome), and got the Netgear Nighthawk 7800. I was hopeful all my problems were going to be solved, but when I logged in I was not impressed by their management interface, and again they were pushing me to load some phone app to manage it. Plus, if I remember right (I didn’t look at it long), the parental controls stuff was again some 3rd party/cloud service. That’s when I found the world of 3rd party router firmware. You gotta love these folks who build this stuff. DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenWRT… and I’m sure there are more.

I opted for DD-WRT and haven’t looked back. Don’t get me wrong… it has taken a lot of reading, configuring, trial and error to get things going. But at the end of the day I have a router that works well (good coverage, speed, and uptime - I don’t know of any unexpected reboots). I have firmware that lets me control and access more features of my router than what the manufacturer themselves provided. And I can access all of it directly: I’m not being pushed to someone’s cloud management service, subscription, or phone app to get the functionality.

I understand the expectation that these big-name consumer router manufacturers should provide premium firmware to match their fancy hardware. But what I saw is they’re spending their software effort on phone apps and cloud services, some of which you have to subscribe to, to get that premium experience. I’m not interested in that, and the impressive 3rd party router firmware community seems to fill that gap nicely.

I’ve never seen a worthy consumer router firmware.

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…and a good way to so your support is to click the donate button each of these have :slight_smile:


I’ve been running dd-wrt since the original wrt54g, sadly the UI hasn’t changed since (sure, you can change colors). but the overall function has grown as has hardware [netgear R7000]

Also reasonably happy with FreshTomato. I liked it, but I think I’d become compliance with dd-wrt.

mistakenly ran xwrt-vortex, it’s not as open source as claimed, it’s forked from asus project and it re-writes your CFE with no warning! bad deal cause you can’t run dd-wrt without figuring it out.

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too many pictures/icons and useless pretty stuff! as noted, a “phone app” for a router? isn’t that sweet

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I’m single and only have 6 or 7 devices connected so no problem here.

I was using a NETGEAR XR300 that I beta tested and was getting horrible download speeds. Switched back to the Google WiFi we had from before and it’s working great.

Other than a few restarts per year my Netgear R6400 has given me no problems over the years (I think 4 years now). Tablo’s performance has been pretty much flawless. I’ve installed every firmware update with no issues. Depending on what’s powered up I have 10 to 12 devices connected. Seven of them being wired to the router. I wire everything that’s capable.

Yea, only way I’d let Amazon devices in my house… so they hear me talking to my cats :cat: Actually have several around the house used mostly for “whole house” music. Decades ago I’d crank it up to hear tunes through out the house… now I have speakers sync’d in every room.

Have several “smart plugs, lights and switche”, the days of X10 are long past. So it’s nice to have some home automation again, occasionally voice control, but scheduling usually covers things.

Then media PC for the TVs, old-school setup I guess. Phone and tablet… and “regular” PC and old PC(s) I guess. Couple printers and weather station gateway. Things add up :crazy_face:

note: anything with an ethernet port is wired :grey_exclamation:

I have the UDM-Pro UniFi Ap ‘s and several switches. I can’t for the life of me get port forwarding to work.

I have the UDM (not Pro) and port forwarding works fine.

I have a UDR (the newer baby brother of the UDM) and also have no port forwarding issues.

What version of the UNA are you running? I’m on 7.2.92.

I’m running latest firmware and updates on both Tablo and UDM-Pro. This is an example of how I attempted to set up port forwarding

I’ve never tried to use a mobile app. I always do it in the web interface.

But it looks to me you have those entries reversed. Source would be the IP/Port on the router, destination would be the Tablo.

I also wonder about the From == Limited entry. What’s that supposed to do?

In order to enter a specific IP you have to select limited other option is all.