Question What's the best router for a small business out of Asus RT-AX58U and TP-LINK AC1750?

THpubs

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Nov 2, 2012
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I need a good stable router for our small office. It need to be able to handle multiple devices and should have a good range. Also want better bandwidth monitoring and control. Limit bandwidth per each device and see what's taking up more data. Currently these are the two best options I came down available in our country. TP-LINK AC1750 comes with the Omada app which people say is a good way to manage your network. But I haven't seen much bandwidth control in there. In the other hand, Asus already have good bandwidth control options. With the Merlin Firmware, I can upgrade those capabilities. What do you think?
 
The range the signal goes is purely a function of how much transmit power the router has and almost all routers transmit at the full legal power. BUT end devices are the other half of any connection and many times they have lower power transmitters to save batter or smaller antenna to reduce size.

Managing your network is far different than monitoring your network. From a quick look that omada app is used when you have multiple AP and want to make the configuration easier. You are not doing that.

How fast is your internet connection. The huge problem you have is the cpu in even the fastest routers is tiny compared to a pc and is much less powerful than many cell phones. Because the cpu is so small they have moved the NAT function off the cpu onto dedicated hardware. This is why even cheap routers can pass traffic at 1gbit rates wan/lan. Problem is the CPU chip is bypassed and can not see the actual traffic. Doing anything that requires the cpu to look at traffic forces this hardware to not be used and the NAT function run on the CPU. Just turning this feature off will cap your rates to say 300-350mbps and it will be even less as you do things like monitor or limit traffic.

Merlin is pretty advanced but it the ability to limit traffic is still pretty basic. You would have to put in lists of ip/mac addresses and limits for each device. There is no magic rule that says limit devices to say 10mbps each without actually putting in a IP or mac address. You also can't put in data usage caps only data rate caps.

You can generate some usage reports but it is hard to say how useful they will be. You have to remember all data is now encrypted so you would see the ip of the local machine and the ip of the internet they were going to and you could calculate the rates but you would not have a way to tell what they are really doing. With huge amounts of traffic going to hosted data centers you really would not be able to tell is someone was look at a server hosted on say amazon cloud or they were shopping on amazon or maybe watching a video.

Again it all depends on how fast your internet is and how much usage there is. You could of course pay big money for one of the fancy commerical firewalls that can do this. You likely will be better off using a pc as a firewall in place of your internet router. This still does not solve the problem of the encrypted data. You will be able to tell who is using bandwidth but not really what they are doing.