Best router for a pair of gigabit Wan

[williamcll]

For a few reason (mainly due to curiosity) I now have two gigabit WAN connections and I am not sure if my ISP provides aggregation or not.  Assuming they do what would be a good router (including prebuilt soft routers because I don't mind using opensense and the like) that supports dual wan aggregation or Load-balanced? Perferably all the ports are 2.5G or higher in case I switch to a more premium connection.

[igormp]

I'd just get one of those x86 or high-end ARM mini PCs on aliexpress and slap openwrt or opensense on it. I personally have a NanoPI R5S, which is enough for my 500+500mb load balancing, but would suffer with anything more.

 

Maybe a NanoPI R6S with its RK3588 or one of those beelink, topton, cwwk, no-brand models with celerons/i3s/i5s/ryzen CPUs.

 

9 minutes ago, williamcll said:

I am not sure if my ISP provides aggregation or not.

You don't need to care about that, get a capable router and you can load balance connections at will.

[Donut417]

5 hours ago, williamcll said:

For a few reason (mainly due to curiosity) I now have two gigabit WAN connections and I am not sure if my ISP provides aggregation or not.  Assuming they do what would be a good router (including prebuilt soft routers because I don't mind using opensense and the like) that supports dual wan aggregation or Load-balanced? Perferably all the ports are 2.5G or higher in case I switch to a more premium connection.

I have to agree with @igormp. Your asking for a router that can support two gigabit connections and have multiple 2.5Gig ports. You're best solution is going to a more custom solution. Because I dont think many consumer or prosumer options exist. 

[williamcll]

12 hours ago, igormp said:

I'd just get one of those x86 or high-end ARM mini PCs on aliexpress and slap openwrt or opensense on it. I personally have a NanoPI R5S, which is enough for my 500+500mb load balancing, but would suffer with anything more.

 

Maybe a NanoPI R6S with its RK3588 or one of those beelink, topton, cwwk, no-brand models with celerons/i3s/i5s/ryzen CPUs.

 

You don't need to care about that, get a capable router and you can load balance connections at will.

Are those running on Intel Celeron N5105 enough or do I need to get a faster one like a Pentium N6005?

[igormp]

6 hours ago, williamcll said:

Are those running on Intel Celeron N5105 enough or do I need to get a faster one like a Pentium N6005?

Those should do, but if you can manage a N100 it should be way better.

[Alex Atkin UK]

23 hours ago, igormp said:

Those should do, but if you can manage a N100 it should be way better.

N5105 can do at least 2.5Gbit (not sure of overhead if using PPP but it should easily handle 2xGigabit IMO), but given the minor price difference the N100 makes more sense.

[igormp]

5 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

N5105 can do at least 2.5Gbit (not sure of overhead if using PPP but it should easily handle 2xGigabit IMO), but given the minor price difference the N100 makes more sense.

Yeah, the N5105 is already capable enough, but usually you can get a N100 model for free even, so there's no reason not to lol

[Alex Atkin UK]

8 minutes ago, igormp said:

Yeah, the N5105 is already capable enough, but usually you can get a N100 model for free even, so there's no reason not to lol

I'm upgrading my N5105 to an N100 so that I can have a backup router I can simply swap in if anything goes wrong.  Will be curious to see if the N100 uses less power as the N5105 already sits around 11-14w most of the time, it pushes up to about 18W at Gigabit over PPPoE. (using a PoE+ to 12V adapter so watts reported from my switch)

[igormp]

Just now, Alex Atkin UK said:

I'm upgrading my N5105 to an N100 so that I can have a backup router I can simply swap in if anything goes wrong.  Will be curious to see if the N100 uses less power as the N5105 already sits around 11-14w most of the time, it pushes up to about 18W at Gigabit over PPPoE.

I'm not really a fan of x86 routers to be honest, I find those to be... boring lol

 

I currently have an ARM one, but would love to go with a RISC-V one in the future haha

 

My current one manages to LB 2x500/250 links without issues (albeit it wouldn't be able to do much more than that), while only pushing ~5W.

[Alex Atkin UK]

25 minutes ago, igormp said:

I'm not really a fan of x86 routers to be honest, I find those to be... boring lol

 

I currently have an ARM one, but would love to go with a RISC-V one in the future haha

 

My current one manages to LB 2x500/250 links without issues (albeit it wouldn't be able to do much more than that), while only pushing ~5W.

No denying that a good ARM/RISC-V design should stomp on x86 for efficiency.

 

But x86 has the huge benefit of compatibility, its a lot less hassle when you need to swap it out (though could be better on pfSense as your interfaces can get messed up if the new unit uses a different driver so the interface names are different).

 

The latter honestly annoys me on Linux too as when they decided to name interfaces based on their physical connection, it was a backwards step to me than eth0, eth1, where you could swap out hardware and the interface names would still match up even if there was a little guesswork on which order they iterated.

[igormp]

4 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

 

But x86 has the huge benefit of compatibility

That's the exact part that I find to be boring, I do like to tinker around with my devices lol

[Alex Atkin UK]

59 minutes ago, igormp said:

That's the exact part that I find to be boring, I do like to tinker around with my devices lol

Yeah but when its the core of your network, its not the smart move.