If Ubiquiti were to get the right drivers and use them in an EdgeOS update (much like they did to enable hardware offload on the EdgeRouter Lite) this little box would become even more capable. Also, the MediaTek MT7621AT SoC used in the EdgeRouter X reportedly has hardware acceleration features, including the AES ciphers used in OpenVPN, that simply aren't exposed by the OS yet. A multi-threaded implementation is already on the project roadmap, and depending on the design, could raise OpenVPN's effective bandwidth limit on this device. The OpenVPN client is currently a single-threaded application, which leaves most of the device's CPU cores sitting idle even while the process hits a CPU limit. However, this might change with future OS updates. Judging by the CPU usage I saw, I'm guessing that today's EdgeRouter X would be unable to run OpenVPN at full FTTN x2 speed. With a $50 price tag, an outstanding feature set, and very modest power consumption, that makes it a winner for me. A better approach for this device would be to make use of its IPSEC VPN acceleration, as Dane mentioned here: viewtopic.php?p=20083#p20083 The EdgeRouter X handled OpenVPN at full FTTN x1 speed. EdgeRouter Lite results: : 9.24Mbps : 11.66Mbps openvpn CPU load: 85-96% EdgeRouter X results: : 18.19Mbps : 18.61Mbps openvpn CPU load: 71-83% The EdgeRouter Lite handled OpenVPN up to about half the download rate of Sonic's FTTN x1 service. I had a few basic firewall, NAT, and port forwarding rules enabled, all typical of consumer internet setups. I tested both routers using Sonic's production OpenVPN server through my 20 Mbps FTTN line, against both and (with curl). This makes it slower than an offload-enabled EdgeRouter Lite for basic routing, but faster for things like OpenVPN and QoS. Although the processor has some hardware offloading capabilities, they are not used by EdgeOS 1.8 (the current version). The EdgeRouter X is about half the size and price of the Lite, has 5 ethernet ports, and an 880 MHz dual-core dual-threaded CPU. Unfortunately, OpenVPN makes the hardare offloading features mostly useless. outer_LITE The EdgeRouter Lite has 3 ethernet ports, a 500 MHz dual-core CPU, and can offload some routing functions to hardware, making it capable of gigabit speeds in certain configurations. After getting mine configured the way I wanted it, I haven't really had to touch it. On the plus side, the command line tools and configuration structure are quite sensible to someone who knows networking, the support community is pretty good, and common operations like port forwarding and checking connectivity can be done from the web UI. Although Ubiquiti's web UI does have setup wizards that can make these devices work like consumer-grade routers, the wizards don't cover OpenVPN or the firewall rules that would prevent VPN leaks. I would recommend these routers only for people who are either good with command line network configuration, or who have someone else to deal with such things. Both these wired-only routers are made by Ubiquiti, cost under $100, and include an OpenVPN client that can be configured through the command line. Following up on my post in the OpenVPN Service topic: I now have FTTN, and have done some tests with OpenVPN running on both the EdgeRouter X and the EdgeRouter Lite.
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