Hey all, I’m soliciting advice today as I am having quite the difficulty finding exactly what I need in a product. Here’s what I am needing, and unfortunately I can’t find anything that seems to match everything. At least not in the reviews I’m reading. You’ve read our reviews, write one for me ;)
- WiFi 6E/better
- USB/NAS ability that supports over 2TB (I find many that work right up to that point and give up – nobody lists size limitations)
- Bonus if it does some sort of cloud file service, but not required
- Non-subscription VPN / OpenVPN compatible preferred
- Ability to support 80+ WiFi devices – this one’s a kicker, I used one that claimed 50+ and it failed hard at 45. I can’t be fighting with a router that can’t support a bunch of IoT devices that are taking next to no bandwidth.
- Ability to punch through plaster walls, brick, and furniture / negotiate and recover from bad WiFi conditions without a reboot required.
- Ability to modify port routing/forwarding/firewall WITHOUT 8+ minute reboots.
- While it would be nice to have 2.5 backplanes, I can deal with gigabit.
Needs to be able to beat my old Portal WiFi in signal strength, clarity, etc.
Will be supporting the following
- At least 8 streaming cameras 1080 & 2x4K mostly WiFi
- 37 low bandwidth IoT devices
- Couple of phones, tablets, TVs
- Two laptops / devices generally on Zoom/Teams at extreme distance from the AP (work, currently, but zoom getting trashed)
- One next to no bandwidth unit exterior house 80+ feet
- Basically think of a small office building but with more IoT junk than you can shake a stick at
- Think “guy who moves a terabyte a day”
- Additionally think “the guy who tests a whole lot of bandwidth hogging WiFi IoT gear”
Has to be rock solid. While I don’t personally mind rebooting a router every now and then for consumer level stuff, I cannot be tech support for my own house the instant I leave my house (we have some off site backups going to my place, wife working from home, lot of remote automation that has to keep going or the self destruct activates.)
My research is getting completely stymied by people saying things perform badly, then usually finding other reviews of theirs where they had the same problem with other devices, leading me to believe they were using a bad device to test. Or people who rate everything 5-stars, blogs that are just trying to make a buck, etc.
