Need help picking a router

Privacy Questions
1

I’m getting gigabit fiber this month, so I need some help picking a router. I’m trying to be as minimalistic as possible, which means that I don’t need anything fancy.

Here are the things that I want:

  • Connect my PC to a router over Ethernet and take full advantage of my gigabit connection.

  • Connect the rest of my devices over WiFi (I have two phones and a tablet) and occasionally connect my guests over WiFi too while maintaining good speed.

  • Would like to get smething more budget. I don’t want to spend a lot on a router.

2

I’ve had great success with GL iNET. You can even flash pure OpenWrt on these little devices. I’ve got the one with a built-in battery and it’s still going great years later.

However, they are not going to get you anywhere near gigabit speeds from my experience. For that, see if you can get a PCEngines APU box. I’ve got one of these with pfSense installed and it is very fast, low power, and no-fuss. WiFi won’t be fast on these however. For high WiFi speeds nothing will beat a consumer router that you connect to one of these, purely as an access point.

I’m assuming you’ll be running a VPN or similar, otherwise I’d just get any consumer WiFi router from the nearest local shop - no privacy-focused router will beat it at speed.

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3

I don’t use VPNs anymore. I would like something with open-source firmware, though. All routers in my local shops come with proprietary firmware.

4

You might find this helpful: https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128, it is a list of all devices that you can buy and reflash with OpenWrt.

pfSense and OpnSense are not at all minimalistic, so OpenWrt would be great for you

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