This sort of thing is good in direct proportion to the quality of the documentation and support. If you don't know what you're doing, the fact that it works feels overwhelmingly important, but conceals the fundamental insecurity. If you do know what you're doing, do you agree with all the policy decisions being made here?
Good documentation and community can bring you out of darkness. I'm not sure this is doing that job as well as OpenWRT or a good distro's user mailing list.
Take a look at <https://www.gl-inet.com/>. These boxes come with a nice, simplified GUI, but will run stock OpenWRT, which you can build yourself if you wish.
I placed one of these boxes behind my ADSL router to do load-balancing. To use it as an Internet router, you'd instead need to couple it with a modem. A colleague whom I trust recommends Draytek kit but (a) I've not tried it, (b) it's not cheap and (c) I'm just a stranger on the Internet, so read around carefully before splashing out.
i didn't realize it, but it seems they provide the bootloader sources which most "open source routers" don't. If they also provide the full board schematics then I would consider them completely open source.
imo it is rude to ask for schematics, the experience in open source hardware is that the only people who use it are the vendors who copy it verbatim and then compete on price, while adding nothing. Even the bootloader is a big ask.
Not fully open source in the sense of only libre ISA and Firmware, but there are some open router, firewall and similar devices developed by CZ.NIC (Czech domain name registry):
a) what your WAN connection is and
b) how open you need it to be (i.e. there are no open hardware wifi cards)
My WAN port is Ethernet (the GPON conversion is done in a box I don't control). This has the advantage that pretty much any OpenWRT router will work.
I currently use a Traverse Ten64 (disclosure: received the unit for free as part of a beta test) which works reasonably well.
You could also look at gl-inet as someone else has mentioned, or the Turris range of routers. I would not be bothering with flashing a commercial router with OpenWRT anymore.
Recently, I've been forced down a rabbit-hole in this space, the tl:dr of it being I have crappy internet where I live, and I've had to cobble together a multiple-ISP solution with load balancing wherein the individual ISP connections are on opposite sides of the house, and it is absurdly difficult to understand.
I have a ton of old computers/equipment that I'm sure could do most of the lifting, and I'm relatively proficient in Linux et al, it's my daily driver -- but I just ended up buying a load balancing router and using multiple routers etc.
It's frustrating knowing that I don't need it, but the family needed remote-work-class internet faster than I could learn how to do it my way.
Hopefully well see more stuff like this because, unless I missed something big, this space is dismal
I've found myself in a similar situation. What I've learnt is that good load-balancing makes a surprising difference. It won't help you back up your files to the cloud any faster, but it will keep your Internet connection usable for other people while you do so. I've gone from being unable to hold one decent Skype conversation to being able to hold two in parallel on the same network. I've gone from ping times of up to 800ms when my wife used WhatsApp to ping times below 25ms in all realistic load conditions, including WhatsApp, and even flat-out file transfers in both directions at once. For video conferencing and general Web browsing, low latency is usually more important than high bandwidth.
The route I took was to place a small, low-power Linux box between my network and my ADSL router, running OpenWRT, and then configure load-balancing on that. A Web search for "bufferbloat cake" (no, really :-)) will show you one of the most useful Web sites I found.
One other measure you can take is aggressive content-blocking. I use Pi-Hole, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and Blokada, and I recommend them all. If you don't have much bandwidth, you don't want to give half of it away to marketers and creepy trackers. Use what little you have to work for you, rather than against you.
Having started from a position of knowing very little about Linux networking, I'd say that the Linux networking stack is powerful, flexible and fast, but it's let down by the available documentation, most of which seems to have been written at least fifteen years ago, and much of which is simply out-of-date. I couldn't find anything that just starts at the beginning and tells you everything you want to know, and is based on modern Linux commands and facilities. I'd write it myself if I understood it well enough but, honestly, I still don't. For anyone who wants to contribute to Linux but is a wordsmith rather than a coder, here's your chance.
I'm sorry -- slip of the keyboard. Where I wrote "load-balancing" here yesterday (not once but twice), I should have written "traffic-shaping." I have only one Internet connection -- that's all I can get here -- but traffic-shaping moves the queue from the ADSL router or the ISP into the little Linux box, where it can be managed better, and ensures that heavy users such as big uploads and downloads don't crowd out interactive users. The Web search I suggested will make more sense in that context!
The home networking space has really been broken for quite a while now. We've forced home users into separate-but-unequal internet using NAT's and forced private addressing. Part of it is there are no more IPv4 addresses to go around anymore. Part of it is that IPv6 has been delayed by 20 years, and now IPv6 isn't what we need at all, frankly.
It seems like lately it's like regular expressions, obscure to many but when you really need it, you really need to know it.
Yeah, and I think it's important to note that there's NOT much incentive for big companies to help us get this right; there's just so much opportunity for them to insert their own little whatever in the middle; so they'll happily partly solve the problem for us, but usually involving phoning home in a way that we don't need.
The TP-Link TL-R605. It says a bunch about "Omada" and I still don't really get what that is. Don't worry.
And yes, Amazon et al DO NOT HELP because all of the little boxes look exactly the same, and Amazon will happily recommend the wrong thing. This was how I learned that you can return things at Whole Foods easy.
Just grab something like pfSense or any variant that will give you a GUI to do this wayyyyy more easily and with someone knowledgable configuring it and testing it.
pfSense gives you the shape of the problem and creates bounds. Being on your own in a text editor with google allows you to shoot yourself in the foot while stumbling in the dark.
Wow this looks very promising and it shows that the author spent many hours developing and refining the scripts.
This can be easily incorporated into a guide book as a long awaited replacement for Tony Mancill's Linux Router book that's long overdue from 2002 [1].
Kudos Gary, I wished I can buy you a coffee, do you accept PayPal ;-)
[1]Linux Routers: A Primer for Network Administrators (2nd Edition):
one really nice feature - especially for the pi - is that the filesystem is read-only and runs with an overlay filesystem from ram. This give you the ability to see what is changed or back up your changes by accessing the overlay directly.
Another feature is the GUI. You can easily get started, but as you become familiar with the system, you can just edit the configuration files to change things.
Oh wow I could of used this a couple months ago. I tried doing this myself. But, instead bought a ASUS router maybe when my asus router decides to crap out I will replace it with this defintely bookmarking and staring.
I literally also did this two weeks ago, I repurposed an ASUS PN50 as a router. Luckily, I didn't have that much trouble and wound up refreshing my network chops a bit (using tcpdump to diagnose a dhcp server that wasn't doing what it was supposed to)... I'm considering releasing a video tut on it. My only complaint is that I think (could be wrong) download bandwidth is limited by the "upload bandwidth" on the ASUS' wifi adapter, since it's running in reverse.
Good documentation and community can bring you out of darkness. I'm not sure this is doing that job as well as OpenWRT or a good distro's user mailing list.