Verizon’s ONT was serving over coax as the house was wired with coax. Now that we use YouTube TV rather than traditional cable, we don’t need coax for anything, so rewired the house with cat5e to all floors. This change made it easier to get rid of the rental ($10 per month) Quantum router, since there was no advantage to serving anything over coax.
Bought a Ubiquiti Edgerouter X to replace the Quantum. Almost bought the ER-4 instead, but we only have 300/300 internet and it seemed that, at worst, the ER-X would be able to handle these speeds with hardware offloading. We’ve been beta testing Plumes for WiFi for a couple years now, so it was an advantage to have a router without built-in WiFi.
After setting up a basic config with the “WAN+2LAN” wizard everything was working fine, but there were some latency issues at busy times. Looking into the QOS options, the Smart Queue seemed the best candidate for solving latency by holding back some bandwidth in order to handle new requests. Unfortunately, the ER-X is not robust enough to handle Smart Queue with 300/300, so I ended up applying it only to uploads and by lowering the speed to around 100. Seemed better to allow new streams some space, rather than allowing existing streams to fully saturate connection.
In hindsight, an ER-4 might have been a choice for our speeds and apparent need for QOS, but the ER-X was only about $60, whereas the ER-4 was about $185. If we get additional speed upgrades from Verizon, we’ll have to either offload routing to the ER-X’s hardware, or pony up additional money for the ER-4. That said, even though the 4 is much beefier, it isn’t entirely clear to me that it could handle Smart Queue for speeds much higher than 300/300 anyway. It’s also unclear to me why Smart Queue should be necessary for speeds much higher than 300/300.
Update: removing smart queue and enabling offloading seems to be the best policy at this point. Investigating community project of adding CAKE for controlling individual devices that might be hogging bandwidth. Smart Queue seems to solve the wrong problems for my network at this point.