Bitcoin Forum

Looking for recommendations for a wifi router that will work well with home mining.

I am currently using an outdated dlink router which does not like when I try to watch netflix and running miners all at the same time

EDIT: miners are run off ethernet cable, wifi is is used for all other devices on the network

Short and quick answer:
Even by itself, WiFi is bad idea for mining as the connection is rather variable. Alwayss use hardwire connections.

Throw in media streaming over the same WiFi connection and forget it. Aside from the really latest/greatest and $$ WiFi bandwidth sux plus, to use the latest WiFi standards both ends of the connection have to support them.

My mining equipment is connected to the router via ethernet but the same router is also used for wifi

Ever since I went with enterprise grade networking equipment, I have never looked back.  Ubiquiti stuff works good for me, way more reliable vs consumer routers, separated wifi (via access point) from router, etc.  And the difference in price isn't even that much, especially considering it won't crap out in a couple years, or become out-dated.  I'll never go back.

Thanks for the suggestion. I am going to try out the Ubiquti AirRouter

you can try making a Pfsense box

My long-time "router" for my mining (and everything else) was an old AMD K6-450 based Slackware LINUX box - which had more CPU horsepower than a lot of the current router "appliances".

 Currently use a Netgear "Blue Box" appliance unit - I've had VERY good results with Netgear professional line equipment over the years, NEVER had one die in less than 15 years of usage (and some over 20 STILL RUNNING).

 I don't do wifi - PERIOD. Security is a joke, reliability is poor, speed isn't really an issue but wifi is still trying to catch up with Gigabit Ethernet that's 15+ years old, dropped packets are a way of life which causes issues, etc ad nausium.
 IMO wifi is just junk that should only be used when you need a net connection to gear that *MUST BE PORTABLE*.

Hard connection is a must for miners. Otherwise you get dropped packets, missed shares, stale shares and even stale and bad blocks mined if you hit one. Wifi just isn't reliable as it's a half duplex connection that can only send data one way at a time, where ethernet and hard connections are full duplex and two way data transfer can be done.

You can run miners on wifi still, however, at low speeds and not get reductions in shares too much as long as range is good.

Ether over powerline is the best thing for mining just plug 1 adapter near your router and 1 adapter near your miners VOILA

I'm not sure the router you need really matters very much. If the miner is quick, it has been said here that the miners use a maximum of 1mb/s.
This being said, you'd need requirements for:
• 1mb/s per miner
• ~10-20mb/s for each device you wish to stream from using other content.

It is probably helpful to get two routers and two internet cables, or to try to combine the miners in any way you can (like the way you can join 3 antminers of the same type to one control computer).

1 mbit/s?? negative.

last i checked on my ubuntu box my two gpu zec miner running claymore (statum) used like 20k/sec.

even getwork is nowhere near that.

More like 1 MByte / HOUR at most even for larger ASIC rigs.

 My entire farm was using less than 100 MB / DAY back when I was on a metered Sat connection (which I strongly recommend against, the high latancy was hard on stale shares, but the options I had at that location were ALL bad). 5 A2 Terminators, 5 S5 and a SP20, and some GPU rigs doing various stuff at the time.

I run a 100KW datacenter off a custom pfsense box on a 3mbit synchronous line, and can stream netflix through it just fine.

For a faster connection and a way to limit any latency then  I'd say it's probaly useful to get something at that speed. They're not exactly scarce in production. He said he wanted to do other things with the router other than host miners so 1mb/s is probably quite good to use for a faster speed per miner and to allow for extra for other devices.
I didn't realise that mining used so little bandwith as it's not something I constantly monitor.

I run my entire rig of 3S5s and 1S3 as well as a variety of small stickminers controlled by a Pi on just 1,5Mbps wifi, and nothing too bad happens. Latency isn't much of an issue for me, I rarely get missed shares even though I sometimes bump it up to 5mbps randomly just to be sure. Bandwidth really is the least of your worries in mining. Just make sure range is not too far or you might face issues.

That's good to note. Do you do anything as well as mining on that router or is that connection merely for mining? The range will definitely solve as an issue as it's too far away.
Also, is the internet speed you need for mining greater if solo mining than it is if using a mining pool?

Agreed, I run two S9s and two S7s on a satlink as that is my only internet connection option.  It's not ideal but works just fine with invalid shares at worst less than .2%

I have 100Mbps internet, and I have those miners hooked up to a repeater that is limited to however much wifi bandwidth I allow to pass through on it. It's all I use on that repeater. I suspect solo will have slightly higher bandwidth requirements, but that should still be negligible. You could try dial-up if you only have a few miners, but latency could be an issue.