Like all my reviews, this is a down and dirty, no mumbo jumbo review using my real world experience.  Today we will be looking at the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter lite (ERLite-3).

If you’re not familiar with Ubiquiti, (http://ubnt.com) they are a manufacturer of wired and wireless networking gear built for commercial and industrial use. Anyone who knows me knows I won’t let a little thing like that keep me from using it at home. I have a Cisco modem, Open-mesh access points and now a Ubiquiti router.

Disclaimer: None, this equipment was not provided to me by the manufacturer, I obtained it myself.

Pros:

Design: The industrial design of the ERLite-3 is nice. It’s a simple metal box with 3 gigabit ports, a console port (for you CLI junkies) and a power port (on the back side.

Size: I won’t lie; this thing is small. Coming in at 3” x 5” x 9.5” and weighing in at less than 2 pounds, it’s much smaller than the ASA5505 that it replaced.

Configuration: Ubiquiti has a really nice user interface they call the EdgeOS. It’s easy to navigate, provides a tone of useful information about the device and what’s going across it and provides some wizards to help you get up and running quickly. I had the router up and running with the basics in less than 5 minutes.

Features: being a commercial device I would expect it to have lots of features and options. It does indeed have a nice selection of things to play with. You can configure static routes, it supports OSPF, RIP , and BGP. It has an integrated full featured firewall, NAT translation, can be used as a DHCP server, supports QoS, supports IPv6, does site to site ipsec and OpenVPN  VPN, L2TP/PPTP remote access vpn, can be configured using gui or CLI, and has a nice suite of monitoring and admin tools.

Layer 3: Yep this little guy is a layer three device (DUH) that can handle 1,000,000 pps with 64 byte packets and 3 Gbps with 512k or larger packet sizes. Not too shabby.

Price: I hate to use the word cheap, so let’s use inexpensive. The ERLite-3 has a MSRP of $100.00 I picked mine up on amazon for $92.

Neutral:

No wireless: I’m listing this because inevitably someone will ask “does it have built in wireless?” NO. This is a commercial class device where routers and wireless are generally separate device in the infrastructure.

POE: No this device doe not have POE, nor does it support POE pass through. I wouldn’t expect it to at this price point. Just putting it out there , because we all know someone would ask.

Cons:

Configuration: I know, I know… I have Configuration as a PRO, well there is one little niggle that made me also put it here. The wizards to help you set up the device are great, unless you want to use an IP address scheme different than the 192.168.1.0/24 that it come with as a default. The wizards will allow you to put in a different address scope, but then completely ignores it and sets up your network with the default scheme anyway. While not a huge deal it does mean that you will need to go make some manual changes to your DHCP scope, your interfaces and the like after you run the wizards. Obviously if you use the CLI and configure it that way you don’t have this issue, but let’s face it I’m a lazy mouse jockey.

Other:

Warranty: Ubiquiti provides a one (1) year warranty.

Summary:

Looking at the tally sheet, the PROs out number the CONs by a large margin. This is really a great piece of equipment, especially at a sub $100 price point. It is silent, inobtrusive, and so far reliable. I have also noticed a consistent increase in my over internet speed since switching over to this device. So If you’re looking for a great router and POE and built in wireless are not an issue for you, the ERLite-3 is a no brainer decision.