Scarcity of good routers in India

[VVER#]

Wi Fi 6 routers are more than adequate for 1 Gbps Internet connection.

Wi-Fi 7 gives you no additional benefits but many compatibility issues with WiFi5 gen 1 and previous generation clients.

Wi-Fi 7 is only advisable if your internet connection is multi gig which is not possible in India.

China also does not permit 6 GHz Wi-Fi but due to availability of 10 gbps connection many high end WiFi 7 dual band routers are available.

Asus has many excellent dual band wifi7 routers like the BE88 but an Indian household will find the user experience inferior to a high end Wi-Fi 6 router like the ax11000 pro.

Which is why only low to mid tier TP-Link dual band wifi7 routers are available in India.

 

[jehunix]

@vishalrao I switched from Mikrotik router + TP-Link aps to Ubiquiti gateway and WiFi 6 access points setup.

My experience has been amazing so far. I really like WiFi performance and handoff. Gateway is very capable as well. I think not as feature rich or gives granular control as mikrotik but good enough for ids/ips firewall, vlan management and other functions.

I love the unifi network ui too!! Lmk if you have any specific questions about Ubiquiti.

 

[_rajat]

Ubiquiti makes sense if I had a gigabit connection or multiple ISPs, lived in a big house, maybe with multiple floors and a lot of clients. My usecase is pretty small: 200 Mbps connection, single ISP and 10-15 Clients at max. Ubiquiti gear including a AP, gateway and a switch would cost easily around 40k. My annual TPF plan costed me around 9k for 200 Mbps so yes there is a lot of room for a good router.
Currently my Asus router is working perfectly fine but I am looking to upgrade.
Was thinking of getting a U7 lite AP and gateway ultra, costs around 25k. Let's see.

 

[Trex]

I have been using Routeros for over 2 years now and I love it. The flexibility it gives compared to any consumer router is insane for the price.

 

[vishalrao]

@jehunix does your main ubiquity router device, or any other ubiquity model, have features like dns proxy, policy based routing, sending logs as syslog protocol to other devices, wireguard client/server, etc?

I love the combination of such breadth of sophisticated features yet easy enough for networking n00b like me to successfully configure.

Only reason I'm considering ubiquity is yes the better UI UX and probably better performance like reduced failover/failback between the multiple WANs etc. even though the er605 is not too bad, very happy with the VFM it is.

 

[vishalrao]

BTW I bought a mini PC "router pc" with intel N cpu and 4 ports 2.5gbit intel nic off electroniksindia.com website, too lazy to import from China myself.

Briefly tried a few operating systems and x86 openwrt etc... that's my main choice if I can get something working properly with all the features of the er605 which is openwrt based too heh.

 

[jehunix]

@vishalrao yeah can confirm, my ubiquiti gateway handles all of this. running policy based routing, wireguard client, and dns proxy on my setup rn.

only catch is the remote syslog thing - it only ships out threat detections (ids/ips hits) and ad/content-block events. doesn't forward general firewall logs (allow/deny rules, nat, connection logs) or full traffic logs to a remote syslog server, so that part's limited.

main reason i went ubiquiti tbh - way easier dual wan setup, cleaner ui/ux than most alternatives, and their aps perform well too so the whole ecosystem just makes sense.

 

[jehunix]

@_rajat Cloud Gateway Ultra + U7 lite AP would be around 32-33k in total...

Wouldn't recommend for 200Mbps single connection tbvh! Your gear will be way overpowered for connection too kinda in that case...

 

[Lolita_Magnum]

If someone is running/exploring an x86-based router, I would recommend checking out VyOS.

 

[vishalrao]

Someone posted, maybe different forum, that VyOS has steepish learning curve? Like Mikrotik routerOS?