Sunday, November 15, 2020

Good router for a small business? Recommendations and ideas, please!

I currently manage a business and we have had issues with the hardware provided by the ISP (too many devices and the router is unable to assign an IP to a MAC address - we are in Florida, so this means that several devices often need manual changes for port forwarding when they are assigned random IP via DHCP, or try and grab static IP that are already assigned by the router).

This is highly unfortunate, as I am not the person who originally set up this DISASTER of a network - there appears to be a wall of useless "networking-related" devices, like switches, that are serving no real purpose on the network and leading to absurd scenarios (the primary POS server is not on the same network as the printers, for instance, just to name one problem).

However, the network structure is incredibly basic, and simple. I am looking for a singular router that can handle all modern wifi traffic for the majority of the devices in the building - but also allows several other devices to be hardwired.

In particular, I have the primary POS server and three POS terminals which need hardwired, but may also add three additional POS (they are running wireless at the moment and using an entirely different software, but this is a temporary step as I migrate everything over). I'm guessing what I need is roughly 8 ports on the physical device along with wifi, obviously. If the range is good, that would also be a benefit, but most of the wireless devices are within 40 feet on the physical location the unit will occupy. There are also two DVR systems that likely will need to be hardwired, with a third planned to be added. If there are 8 physical ports, I could make it work and may even end up using one of the switches for the devices that do not really need designated IP or interaction.

Right now, the network is fractured into numerous smaller fragments (I will not even start up the conversation, but there are four different actual networks in the building...). I'd like to condense and unify all of these devices over to a singular router, if possible. The device list would include:

3 POS terminals

1 POS server

2 DVR for security

I may add two more POS to this setup.

There are a myriad of wireless devices, pretty much every other device in the building - including customer devices.

TL;DR: Need a router that can support 6+ hardwired devices, along with a myriad of wireless devices, to occupy (hopefully) the only space on the network tree before connecting to the modem/router provided by the ISP.

Sorry if I did a terrible job explaining. :)



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