I have a home network consisting of several raspberry pis, a Roku, and a total of 4 laptops and smartphones.
Currently, I have the ISP provided router/modem in bridge mode which I'll refer to as my modem. This is connected to my own ASUS wireless router/Access Point which I'll refer to as my access point (AP). The AP supports about 900Mbps. I'm fine with this bottleneck for now as I intend to upgrade my AP in the future
My goal here is to purchase a router that supports the 1.5Gbps that's coming from my ISP's modem. I'd like to use it to set up a VLAN and tinker with, with the ability to connect 4 devices in addition to my access point.
The problem I'm facing is that I haven't yet found a router that's <$200CAD which supports 1.5Gbps. There are probably brands I'm unaware of, so would you fine folks be able to recommend me a router?
Thank you, that looks like a great option.
Adding a 2.5g card to a PC it's the way to go. I put one in my mini 1l PC and run pfsense on it.
Mikrotik is awesome. They are super powerful and super flexible.
But they don't hold your hand, and have a hell of a learning curve.
Luckily, the quick-set default config thing is actually decent these days. So it's easy enough to get a basic setup going, then figure out how the bridge works, vlan tagging, where to add IPs, DHCP settings, DNS whatevers and all that.
It took me about 6 run through of setting it up before I stopped locking myself out accidentally! Probably another 6 before I was confident setting up a new vlan with routing/DHCP/etc.
Just be aware that there are a lot of popular tutorials out there based on older versions of the software, and older ways of doing things. Look for videos from 2022+