I still don’t understand why this isn’t a 2.5G WAN and 2.5G LAN. Is it assuming that people are going to be using it as a router on a stick with a 1G WAN?
most likely because this device is mainly for wifi use, and/or limitation of the SoC.
You want your $90 wi-fi router to do what now?
I can’t tell if WAN is Wireless Area Network or Wide Area Network.
WAN = Wide Area Network
WLAN = Wireless Area Network*Wireless Local Area Network
*WLAN = Wireless local area network
Wide area network. It’s basically the “internet” side of the router.
I know what a Wide Area Network is. I’m just saying the acronym is ambiguous since the advent of WiFi
Not really. WAN has always been WAN. Wireless has always been WLAN.
lan is local area network
wan is wide area network
wlan is wireless local
wwan is wireless wan
Nerd here. You confuse me:
WAN is some up-/downstream port connecting intranets remotely in my novice book. The measurement G doesn’t refer to some advertisement-thingy in terms of wireless speed (but Gigabyte) - Maybe it’s some form of Generation; But then I lack everything including my false base knowledge. Additionally I have never encountered “2.5G LAN” ever before: Would you be able to shed light on my shortcomings? 2.5 x 8 is 20 Gbit. I didn’t read about that size yet.
Edit: Thanks guys!
WAN would be the Internet uplink port. A 2.5G WAN port is a 2.5 gigabit Ethernet port. 2.5 gigabit and o a lesser extent 5 gigabit Ethernet are a standard that’s becoming rapidly available on a lot of hardware. OP is stating that for a device shipping near the end of 2024, a new router that is shipping with only 1 GbE instead of 2.5 GbE is a problem.
I have never encountered “2.5G LAN” ever before
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T
https://www.tp-link.com/se/business-networking/unmanaged-switch/tl-sg108-m2/
now you have ;)
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This is link to CZ.NIC’s Turris offerings.
They ship to “many countries” besides Czech republic, according to their page.
The router itself is quite expensive at around 400 euros for the wifi model.
In case it is not obvious, they are primarily Czech domain registrar.
Just pulled the trigger, only had European plugs in stock. I’ve got adapters so np. I’m getting it to replace my Raspberry Pi router that I’ve been using for a few years.
*Edit, I should say I’m a huge fan openWRT despite the fact that 15 years ago I managed to brick my linksys router so bad it actually caused sparks to shoot out the ethernet jacks. I flashed the wrong model firmware.
That’s amazing, for software to be able to cause that!
Power over Ethernet is a helluva drug
And also highly unlikely in the way described lol
Of course, I just bought a new router, your all welcome
Thank you for your sacrifice.
Which router did you go for, by the way?
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The next router I’m getting!
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This is cool
If only it were a useful hardware configuration.
It’s $90 and for if you want a wifi router. What are you missing?
Yeah this doesn’t hold up against the $200+ options but it’s also not priced that way.
I would need the WiFi and a 5 port integrated switch (won’t refuse 8 either), and then I’d buy 3 or 4 of them immediately.
Switches are like $15, dude.
…and I knew that already when I wrote what I need.
Ever think before you post?
So, how is this any better than the Router Mini PCs you can find in Aliexpress (random example)?
WiFi
The very example I provided comes with an mPCI-e slot to install a WiFi card of your choosing.
Also they have SIM card slots so you can install a data SIM card and set-up a fallback configuration that switches to it if your landline internet connection goes down.
Of course. But this one comes with WiFi onboard and a case with antennas if you go for the clothed option.
Yeah, the case with antennas is a good point - when I decided to concentrate various things in a Mini-PC in my living room (TV-Box, Router and so on) I actually looked into these router Mini-PCs as an option and the biggest problem was the lack of a proper antenna, so I ended up going with a generic Mini-PC and leaving out the router functionality which remains done by my old router (which is quite decent, just a bit outdated).
Mind you, this one also wouldn’t work for me because I’m using 4 Ethernet ports (1 for the external connection and 3 internally) whilst this one only has 2 (a weird choice for a router).
IMHO, this isn’t really better than just getting an SBC with 2 Ethernet ports and WiFi and put it in a box with an antenna), a setup which suffers from exactly the same problem as this one: not enough Ethernet ports.
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GTFO, clicking on “buy now” two times results in some shop which has “aliexpress” as the official partner.
This can’t be a product from the sources mentioned, can it?
It says its a BananaPi product, and BananaPi uses aliexpress as a distributor according to https://www.banana-pi.org/web/index.php?topclassid=155&classid=155&lanstr=en&wap=1
checks out afaik
There are use cases for this router, but please don’t get the plastic clone sold by the same Chinese company that assembles the real thing. (The plastic clone costs a third, but doesn’t have detachable antennas and doesn’t accept mainstream OpenWRT because it uses an almost unknown CPU.)
Myself, when I need a high capability router (for me “capability” typically means “range”) I turn towards a Raspberry Pi and Alfa AWUS1900 wireless card. Yes, it lacks in throughput (USB is a severe bottleneck)… but with a bit of tweaking, you can talk out to 2 kilometers if terrain allows. :)
Mmh only two Ethernet ports? I guess it’s for people who use mostly wifi only?
It’s just the router, I guess. Provide your own switch for more ports.
It’s a router, not a switch.
Well the router I use today has 4 ports (and a built in modem for that matter, but I don’t use that).
I understand I can use a switch, but that means I’ll have to buy a switch in addition to this to replace my router.Which is not a bad thing, it’s more unix if you will. Router is a router, switch is a switch.
You provide your own switch and you choose the features: port count, port speed, vlan, etc — or get a 10€ switch if you don’t care. When a port breaks you replace the switch alone.
Multifunction tools are generally a tradeoff where you buy immediate convenience and pay with more ewaste and more money in the long run.
Good point.
The audience of this router most likely already has a standalone switch within their network.
I have 3 but they’re not close to the router. (What I’m saying is: I’m likely target audience, but I don’t have an additional switch nearby, since so far any router I had also had a built in switch.)
But yeah, I get it. Modularity makes sense for repairability.
Yet for 98% of everyone else, you either need more than 4, or you only need one or two. You got a house full of proffesional gamers that can’t have an extra 15ms of latency?
Isn’t RAM like the biggest bottleneck in routers causing bufferblaot and packet loss?
How does the article not mention how much RAM this device has?
Packet loss occurs when a router has to drop some packets because the buffer to store them is running out because the link where they are supposed to go is overloaded.
Bufferbloat is the issue where you make your queues too deep, i.e. you allocate too much RAM to buffering, while the cause of the buffering still exists, so the deeper queue just fills up anyway, so you haven’t improved anything, and have induced extra latency on the packets that do make it trough.
Deep buffers can help in situations where you have a step down in link speed, but only bursty and not sustained overloading of the slower output link.
The big bottleneck in router hardware is more about TCAM or HBM memory used to store the FIB of the global routing table. Since the table has grown so much the devices with less high speed memory can’t hold the table anymore, and if they start swapping the FIB to normal memory your routing performance goes to shit.
So not all of your concerns seem to apply to this class of device, but of course you’re right, The Register should have mentioned the RAM.
Where do I find TCAM and HBM specs?
Thanks. You know a lot about hardware spec reqs in networking equipment. It always drives me crazy when buying a router because they dont seem to list this info.
Do you have any general advice for spec’ing hardware reqs for small businesses with event spaces with occasionally loads of people? How do u ensure the router can handle everyone’s traffic without dropping packets?
Wait, is this why packet shapers limiting bandwidth on one guest vlan drop so many damn packets? How do you prevent this?
What’s the point of having 1G on WAN and 2.5G on LAN? Traffic won’t hit the LAN port until it’s routed to the Internet, yet the WAN port is the bottleneck.
Edit: Seems like I switch up the port speed but my point still holds as the bittleneck still exist.
Tranfering between devices on the LAN.
Edit: Wait, no, it’s the other way around. 2.5 on WAN, and just a single 1GB LAN port. That absolutely doesn’t make sense.
This is a common setup for WiFi routers, where the idea is that most traffic will be on WiFi.
It’s default 2.5G WAN and 1G LAN. It also has wifi to use some of that bandwidth.
Maybe it can be used as a router on a stick.
That’s the only use I can think of but I don’t know if OpenWRT support VLAN cuz I never used it directly.
Local NAS, local security cameras, in-house streaming, LAN multiplayer, local torrent-like data sharing (FYI, Windows Update and more uses the local network to share update between computers by default, so it gets downloaded once and then shared internally)
Then use a switch …
Does it have enough power to handle routing (not just switching) 2.5Gb + 2.5Gb + whatever the WiFi can support? My guess is it cannot and it would have pushed the price up signifcantly to do so.
Does seem counter intuitive to me as this is squarely aimed at enthusiasts who would like to min max their home network.
Could it help with internal tasks, like self-hosted services or a business that transfers files around a lot?
The price is right for sure, but it’s still sad they didn’t shoot for wifi 7. It was a pretty big leap in latency reduction.
It would be nice if they would make one with 4 or more LAN ports with at least one of them 2.5G and no WiFi. I need multiple access points to get enough coverage. The built in WiFi is useless to me since it won’t integrate nicely with Unifi.
You can hook it to a switch and a Wireless AP… Now your networking is modular.
Turn it off then and use your own APs, it’s what I do in my home. I don’t have this specific router but I have a box with 2 eth ports, one goes to pppoe and the other to my home switch, where my APs are connected.
