TP-Link Safestream Multi WAN VPN Router | 1 Gigabit WAN+3 Gigabit WAN/LAN+1 Gigabit LAN Port | IPsec/L2TP/PPTP VPN Supported| SPI Firewall | DoS Defense | Lightning Protection(TL-R600VPN)

Ok the journey to replace my old tp-link 470+ router took almost a month of research and testing. Here is what I found out and I really hope this helps someone save a bit of time. I was a network administrator over 20 years ago. I do not consider myself an expert by a long shot. I have two 4 Mbps DSL lines entering the house (I am not close to any city). I have an email server, file server and our house is extremely automated. There are only 2 of us in the home but myself and my wife are avid gamers. We stream most of our tv/movie content. Our workout room is all connected with video instructors. I have both mac laptops and tablets, windows gaming laptops, VOIP, Xbox and Linux boxes all running off this network. Daily I am downloading 20-100gig games in the background. I also have a mesh wifi covering the 3 floors of the house and the grounds outside of the home. This gives you and idea of what my challenges are.I want to get use of the full 8 Mbps bandwidth for downloads then scale back so we can watch a movie or play a game or listen to music throughout the home all while the game keeps downloading but at a slower speed. When we are not using the network I would like it to speed back up and use the full 8 Mbps again.I tested an Ubiquiti edgerouter 4, TP-Link TL-R600VPN V4, pfsense on an old water-cooled 3ghz gaming computer and on a protectli vault 4 port quad core. Here is what I experienced.First test was the tp-link. It was running in about 20 minutes from when I took it out of the box with the email server port forwarded. I was able to access my email server outside the house and inside even with pointing our phones to the no-ip dynamic DNS address (kind of like a loopback or NAT reflection). It simply worked. But monitoring is near non-existent so I would need a secondary network monitor and SMS connect which it supports but I figured I would test some other routers. It was so simple to setup including QOS that I kept coming back to use this router as the gold standard setup.Second, I spent a little over a week with the edgerouter 4. It gets great reviews, and the network monitoring was the best of the bunch for me with PfSense a close second and tp-link at near non-existent monitoring/graphing traffic. I always knew what was going on and what the edgerouter was doing with its excellent dashboard. After a few days and many hundreds of pages of reading on forums and chatting with folks as the edgerouter has a very helpful community I got it up and running with both wans and the email server. But gaming was not great. Buffer lag and bloat and constant disconnects were simply just unacceptable and after a week I threw in the towel. Interesting the first-person shooters were not the only issue but Guildwars 2 would just drop either myself or my wife mid adventure 3-4 times in an hour and at other times we could go a complete hour before one of use was dropped. This never happened with the tp-link 470T+ in 4 years, the PfSense or the TP-Link TL-R600VPN. It was only the edgerouter. I had to box up the edgerouter and stop all further work with it.The last router(s) I tested was pfSense with both an old 3ghz gaming box and a protectli 4 port fanless box. I will say the PfSense was the my favorite of all interface and the things that the software can do is incredible. It look less than an hour to download and get the box up and running on my old pc. I purchased a dual port intel nic from amazon and with the nic already on the motherboard I was able to connect 2 dls lines and the local ethernet line. PfSense was completely free! Just the cost of the hardware you will need to run it. After tweaking it for a week I got the load balancing working and the QOS dialed in, performing better than the TP-link TL-R600VPN. I was able to get the most bandwidth with pfSense but I never was able to get my mail server working quite right. I thought the issue was my old gaming computer and I purchased a protectli fanless box – the quality is top notch and installing PfSense took just a few minutes. I can’t say enough about the little box and its capabilities. I think it only used 20W total, so it was not a huge power consumer as the gaming rig/router was. But without getting PfSense working I had to abandon the box. As I recall I spent $350 on the box so it became the most expensive router of the 4 tested.Conclusion – I ended up going back to the TP-Link TL-R600VPN. Why? Well it was the lowest power used, it had 5 lan ports, QOS and load balancing. Its port forwarding and virtual servers work great but most of all everything work right out of the box. I mean everything. Dynamic DNS was a breeze to setup. I am serious when I say it was less than 20 min to get the whole router up and running. I realize I could have spent another couple of days or weeks getting the other routers to work but I finally decided why? This is a home network, I have learned all I wanted to at this point and I had a router that simply worked out of the box for a multi WAN install. Is it perfect – no. Can I monitor the network from its own interface – no!I don’t work for any of these folks and I am not in the tech industry. I am a purchasing manager so trust me there will be many who can do better at setting these up but this is my experience and like many others with a reasonable non-professional understanding of networking this review is intended for you.

I grew tired of constantly rebooting my wireless router when it got bogged down by all the devices connected to it, and the diverse data needs of those devices. My theory was that if I offloaded the router / gateway work to a dedicated device, and switched my wireless router to access-point mode, the separation of concerns would prove more reliable.So I searched for a stand-alone wired router that would be appropriate for demanding home use (streaming, work-from-home VPN, Ring devices, Alexa devices, Roku devices, laptops, phones, and tablets; 26 devices in all), but that wouldn't break the bank. After some research this TP Link model seemed to fit the use case I had in mind.Setup was pretty easy; plug the router into my cable modem, plug my desktop system into the router, reboot the cable modem, and everything just worked. That last step was critical though; the cable modem didn't want to assign an IP to the router until I rebooted it. This is not the router's fault -- it's just something cable modems often do.After I connected the desktop system via network cable, I was able to log into the web GUI for the router. It asks you to set a username and password, and that's pretty much all that was needed to get started. There are plenty of settings for more complicated needs. For example, I set up port forwarding for a couple of services on my desktop system, and set up an IP reservation for the desktop.Next I plugged my old router into the new router. This cascading routing worked just fine, though it wasn't my end goal. So I logged into my wireless router and set it to access point mode. The wireless router rebooted, and then I watched the TP Link's list of DHCP reservations, witnessing each of the wireless devices connected on my network reconnecting using the old router as an access point and the new router as the gateway and DHCP server.It works flawlessly in this configuration. Whats more, it seems to provide better throughput then when everything was going through the old router (both wired and wireless connections). My Internet service is touted to be 200 Megabit, but before the upgrade I was seeing speeds in the 160 Megabit range for wired devices. The old router just had too much going on, I guess. With the new router my wired speeds are in the 230 megabit range, and even my wireless speeds reach up that high if I'm sitting close enough to the access point.Things I like about this device: It's small, easy to use, and powerful enough to handle a household of streaming plus work-from-home VPN, plus various other odd devices (Alexa, Hue, Roku, laptops, android phone and tablets, etc).The device's GUI is not exactly simple, but basic operation *is* simple. And after becoming familiar with the web GUI everything that should be there is pretty easy to find, and then some. Configuration options are also a lot more powerful than typical home wifi-routers.I also like that it allows me to hide the squirrel's nest of network cables without also being forced to hide the wireless access point. When you have your router acting as a wired network switch plus a wireless router, you've got to set that thing where wifi propagation will be best. But if you separate those concerns, all the wiring can go to the router, hidden away somewhere, and a single network cable can then run to the wireless access point. Cable management and clutter are easier to minimize.I like the device status page, too. Why can't home wireless routers provide such easy to understand stats? This router's stats make sense and are actually useful. And I like the system log viewer in the GUI. Again, system logs seem way too hard to look at on home / consumer level wireless routers. This devices log page actually shows relevant information.Finally, I'm looking forward to the day when I upgrade my wireless network to WiFi6/AX without having to reconfigure the router settings. I can just set up a WiFi6 access point, and all the wired router's settings still apply. Much easier transition, and less expensive.Routers and WiFi have different product life cycles. It's great separating those concerns, the result is usually better performance and better flexibility.I've done some additional testing. Using the 'iperf' tool I verified that throughput within the LAN reached speeds in the 926-948 megabit range. That's exactly where things ought to be for a gigabit router. I also watched CPU usage on the router while doing iperf tests and barely noticed even a blip on the graph; CPU usage remained quite low.NAT throughput is at least as good as I need it to be, also. I don't know where it maxes out, but my ISP claims to provide me 200 megabit service, and I'm witnessing 235 megabit throughput to the Internet. So the device is at least keeping up with the bandwidth I purchase, and then some. I think the advertised NAT throughput is around 620 mbps. So this should easily support the great majority of home Internet speeds.