Seems like now is as good a time as any for people who know how to do this to build their own routers with Pfsense, Opnsense, ClearOS, or one of the many other firewall/router distros out there.
You can get an old desktop or laptop that's more than good enough to be a router for basically nothing (or sometimes literally nothing) on Craigslist or Ebay. I suspect pretty much anyone who frequents this forum could probably figure out how to do it with a YouTube tutorial. Routers are pretty dumb computers, so you don't need something top of the line.
Even if you want higher speed than the ethernet port built into the computer, you can buy old dual-port 10GbE PCIe cards for less than $50 on eBay as well.
I've been running my own custom thing with NixOS for a couple years now, and it's been working great, and before that I ran ClearOS for a couple years, and before that I ran OpnSense for a couple years. They all work fine, and they're not too hard to set up. I recommend it to anyone who can figure out how to do it.
I do the same with an old Optiplex and OpenWRT but I want to make clear the power consumption of an x86 box is magnitudes higher than an embedded-ARM box and is something to consider when leaving running 24/7. If you were to use a NUC or NUC-like form factor, power may be less of an issue.
Yeah, I'm using a mini PC with a thunderbolt 10GbE card. According to my Kill-a-watt, most of the time it hovers around 10 watts of power. Not as low as something like a Raspberry Pi but within my pain threshold.
Though that said, even with a regular old desktop, which is what I used before, the power consumption actually didn't get that high. Even with a lot of torrent traffic FROM LINUX ISOS, it generally hovered around 35W of power, and considerably less when it wasn't busy. Maybe I just had a decent power supply in there, not sure, it was literally a desktop that I got for free from a neighbor that was moving.
ETA:
I should clarify, even though the computer itself hovers around 10-15 watts, I do have an external switch and an external access point. The switch hovers between 25-30W, and the access point hovers around 15 watts. This is definitely a fair bit more than you'd get with a consumer router, so adjust for your pain tolerance. You might be able to find lower-power switches if nothing else.
Yeah I've investigated this before and found as well those old Intel dual/quad 10GbE PCI-E cards have quite a high idle power consumption just on their own
Even easier, just throw together some iptables rules & install dnsmasq. Obviously out of reach of most non-techy people but it's not much worse than most self-hosted things people build. I've even done it with USB-Ethernet dongles.
Maybe "whitebox" stuff will have a moment here. Buy a ARM based "computer" that just happens to have a built in switch and 802.11 radio, and separately purchase an SD card with the OS on it.
Or, perhaps this will be VyOS's time to shine... https://vyos.io/
Can't really see anything really happening in the consumer space, but maybe business/enterprise will move in one direction or another.
The easiest one I've set up was ClearOS. I was happy enough with OpnSense but when I upgraded a network card I had issues with driver compatibility because of the FreeBSD core. ClearOS being Linux it worked out of the box, and getting ClearOS set up seriously only took me like fifteen minutes. I was shocked.
I love my NixOS thing, because I am part of the cult of NixOS, but it's probably something I wouldn't recommend for most people because it was kind of a pain in the ass to get working. The reason I do it now is because it lives on the same box that is my server.
I've looked into Vyos, it sort of reminds me of the Cisco stuff and it looks interesting, but it never seemed sufficiently better than my NixOS thing.
I really don't think that the Nix language is nearly as bad as people say it is once you get used to it, and I've been using NixOS since before ChatGPT was released so I've gotten pretty ok with it. Plus, there are niceties like being able to use variables for things like interface names which makes it pretty nice.
Also, something kind of nice about NixOS is that once you get it working, it kind of stays working. I have my config file backed up to Sourcehut, and I'm relatively confident that the configuration file is an accurate representation of reality.
It's not the router part that's hard. Any PC can become a router. You still need a wireless AP with an RF transceiver. That's where the restrictions are and why the FCC regulates them in the first place.
I have 2 MX4300 and 2 E8450. all run openwrt. Only wifi 6, but that is all I need for my family. Right now only using 1 of each and the other two are backups. I got them all super cheap when they were on sale.
Consumer routers are just Arm chips running linux, a wifi card, and a network card with a switching chip. I have a little Intel Atom box that i use for my network edge running OPNsense, and it is indistinguishable from any consumer router I've tested it against.
I use a 10GbE switch that was retired from a datacenter, so the switching is as good or better than most things. It wasn't expensive, I think I paid less than $70 for it.
As far as network routing is concerned, I haven't been able to see much of a difference. iperf3 shows that two wired connections I'm getting about 9.4Gbps, which is well within any tolerance I need. The router that Verizon gave me only had 2.5Gbps ports so I can't quite compare apples to apples, but the latency was generally pretty similar.
I mostly just like the level of customization I'm allowed to have. There's no arbitrary limits to port forwards and I can install extensions or write my own if I want.
You can get an old desktop or laptop that's more than good enough to be a router for basically nothing (or sometimes literally nothing) on Craigslist or Ebay. I suspect pretty much anyone who frequents this forum could probably figure out how to do it with a YouTube tutorial. Routers are pretty dumb computers, so you don't need something top of the line.
Even if you want higher speed than the ethernet port built into the computer, you can buy old dual-port 10GbE PCIe cards for less than $50 on eBay as well.
I've been running my own custom thing with NixOS for a couple years now, and it's been working great, and before that I ran ClearOS for a couple years, and before that I ran OpnSense for a couple years. They all work fine, and they're not too hard to set up. I recommend it to anyone who can figure out how to do it.