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Hey ,I have setup consumer routers for small businesses ranging from 3-15 employees such as the ASUS RT-N66U router . I have never had any complaints about them and they seem to be pretty fast. The offices don’t need anything special such as WAN failover or VPN,

is this an OK procedure for small offices or am I taking a risk ?

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If you want to combine router + wireless access point for the purpose of saving money, I guess a smaller office would be OK with that. When I see >10 people behind a cheapo integrated unit like that, I guess it would depend on whether they could make money/get business done if the unit went down.

I don’t even run a router/WiFi/switch unit at home, you can get a very good AP for less than $100 and a very good router for less than $100. Depending on your age, it’s like the difference between a big boombox for $250 and a component stereo system for “a bit more.”

For anything serious, you will be better served with more specialized equipment.

Regards,

Brian in CA

3 Spice ups
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What Brian said.

The likelihood of a consumer router locking up increases substantially as the number of users goes up.

My school had a consumer router when I got there. I never figured out the magic number, but under stress, the DHCP would just freeze. Reboot got it back, but it was a daily thing. Once we got a grant for a server, gave DHCP to it and it behaved better but rebooting was still way too common. Doesn’t take too many episodes before you see the high cost of cheap.

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3-8 I would say, yes, it will likely be fine. 3-15 is a little worse off.

Perhaps, if you got two of them and bridged them etc. which I am not sure if these models support this but then that would negate the cost savings I would imagine.

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Ask the users.

Believe that model has alternate firmware options which can help some. For instance, may want to offload logs for tracking and health monitoring. Splitting SSIDs for internal & external is a must. Users will grumble about security, yet that is separate from day-to-day satisfaction.

Also, alternate firmware can have chron jobs for power up, power down, and rebooting. Pick and choose those to your comfort level (& document accordingly).

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This is very true, but usually not things like DHCP or DNS - they are usually fine. The big one is the NAT Session table which on most devices is around 5000 entries. In my experience, once you get to around 20-30 active machines behind this sort of device then things will slow down for no reason, and generally lock up.

Most of the more ‘enterprise’ devices will have 25,000 or even 50,000 entry NAT tables and will last a whole lot longer without running out of NAT space. I like the Drayteks which seem to have lots more NAT space than regular networking devices, yet without the pricetag of moving to Cisco.

I also get good results out of Ubiqiuti gear - the EdgeRouter Lite is nearly bulletproof once you have a working config, and is ridiculously fast. Otherwise the top end Asus devices are usually good and have large NAT table space.

@Ubiquiti_Inc

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I would set up something more on the line of a business class system. Truly you can get a pretty good setup depending on the needs of the office, for around 400 dollars. I am going to be implementing this system at a local inn. Where they have several guests all at once. 276.7. + hourly setup. Pretty cheap for professional equipment.

Router: Amazon.com

Switch: Amazon.com

Access Point: https://store.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-34.html

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Just for price comparison, I got my home EdgeRoute LIte via Amazon Prime for $87 delivered. I don’t know that it’s a very good home unit for 99% of the world, but even a SMALL business gets a lot more potential performance and capability - VPN for one thing.

Regards,

Brian in CA

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I currently use consumer routers for a bunch of my remote offices (3-8 people) and am moving away. They tend to need the occasional reset and don’t have the longest lifespan. MikroTik makes some awesome, reasonable priced, business quality routers. Shortly all my offices will be on these. They run circles around consumer routers and can do anything you can imagine.

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Mikrotik is very good as mentioned above.

The cheapest ones go for around $50 give or take but they can run VLAN’s, bond DSL lines and a whole lot more. The suburb I live in has an ISP for around 20 households that ran off just one of those Mikrotiks (rb750 I believe) as the backbone and never had a days trouble, we upgraded now though :slight_smile:

Hope this helps

Regards

Cuan

3 Spice ups
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Usually I recommend/sell business routers for networks with more than 5 clients or when stability is a MUST.

The bigger the network (or more exactly: the more simultanous accesses) the more problems you can expect with a home-router. Good business routers begin at around 250 EUR (about 300 USD).

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I can see why people criticise consumer-grade combo wifi and router devices, but having integrated is no big deal if you buy the right kit.

I’m a huge fan of both Draytek and Mikrotik (at a push, I’d pick Mikrotik’s kit every time though).

Something like a Draytek Vigor comes with support for custom routing, automated WAN failover, VPN support and more, in addition to WiFi. Mikrotik Routerboard devices are in a class of their own though. These are enterprise-grade devices that sell for very cheap. Once you’ve learnt how to get on with RouterOS, the Mikrotik operating system for all their devices, the possibilities these devices offer are breathtaking, all in a stable, ultra-reliable device.

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