Bothers me how well my kids are trained to reset the router when anything goes wrong... maybe it's time to buy one of these.

@Craig - Yeah, I hear you on that. I hate how often I need to fix home internet issues via resetting router and/or modem. At one point, it was so terrible that I started a spreadsheet to track every time a reset was needed. And I hate what a pain it is to isolate where the issue's really at, especially when service providers always try to deflect. <cough>Charter</cough>. There was one time where a router was getting the blame but then when Charter was finally convinced to come out and do some work on the line—surprise!—things got a lot better. (Not that the router didn't still have issues, but at least the resets went from daily to weekly.)

Friend of mine once got so annoyed by hardware issues, that he spent a bunch of money to get some high-end equipment. Reminds me that I should follow up to see how that's been going and if it was worth it...

@Brandon - And per Craig's comment, I'd love to get a report from you at some point about if the reliability on this thing is better than the standard consumer-grade routers.

I'll give a long term report when I have more data. Right now I've only had it for a couple of days.

In general with networking hardware the more you spend the more you get. Cheaper routers tend to have worse cooling, chipsets which fail over time, not enough memory, bad antennas, bad software, etc. You can get a well-built cheap router but it's harder to do. Most consumer routers don't even have enough processing power or storage speed to use the full potential of the interface (ie you won't get the 1Gbps that's advertised). Depending on the home and the people using the network ~>= $120 is what I would expect to spend on a router.

The reason I got this router is that it's essentially a computer which gets regular software updates. I can ssh into it, modify the networking config /etc/config file via vi, etc. I can expand or replace parts of the hardware like wireless chipsets or antennas or msata storage. I can install lightweight VMs on it like pihole. I can even program the LEDs to do whatever I want :) Search youtube for Turris Omnia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IYAROVCbU0

Niiiiice! Yeah, this thing sounds pretty intriguing. Where did you end up ordering it from?

I was going to order from Amazon but they ran out so I ordered from the same company on eBay. I tried waiting for the higher spec'd one but I couldn't wait any longer. It looks like they're back on Amazon now though.

@Craig, you see this episode? haha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAJbOygaJ0o