Router at smart home is essential piece of equipment, providing fast and reliable internet connection. As long as your internet provider provides fast and reliable service. Here in Lithuania, major ISP’s provides fiber to the home service, so using such provider we can get reliable and high speed services.
In many cases internet services provider provides to the user preconfigured router. Such router in many cases is reasonable solution. But if you need some special configuration – such router will have limitations.
Here is a list of my requirements for the router:
- It has to be reliable and fast.
- Has to provide solid firewall.
- Has to have VPN server function for remote connection to home network.
- Has to support virtual networks vLAN, for local IPTV from ISP.
- It has to be easy to configure and maintain.
- Has to have some kind of functionality to restrict, limit or turn off internet for selected device at selected time.
I have been using a lot of different routers with various firmwares: Apple, Linksys, TP-Link, Asus devices. With default firmware these routers are capable of providing basic functionality or router. Internet connection sharing and protection of network. But if you need to configure virtual network for IPTV or VPN server, you need to install third party firmware. For example DD-WRT or Tomato. From my experience i can tell, that there are many problems using 3rd party firmware, such as router becomes unstable and reboots on high load, or it just not provides the required speed of internet.
At this time i have chosen Mikrotik router. From my requirements list it is totally not easy to configure and maintain. I think that Mikrotik is too hard to configure for regular home user. But if you spend a little time for learning, Mikrotik becomes powerful and reliable home router. For this time i have no idea how to configure it to restrict, limit or turn off internet access for specific device. My wish is to find solution how to not only restrict the time for internet use, but also to filter content of internet. If you have kids you will understand why i need this.
So the router for smart home is selected. For home is enough the first or second model from manufacturer https://mikrotik.com/products
In next blog post you will find how to configure Mikrotik to provide basic router functions, port forwarding, vLAN configuration for IPTV, VPN server.
