Alta Labs Route10 on IDNet review

[chaz6]

I was previously with V***** M**** and I switched to IDNet as soon as CityFibre was ready for service at my property. Until recently I was using an Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite (aka ERLite-3) but unfortunately it was no longer up to the task, as it does not support hardware offload for ipv6+vlan+pppoe (it supports /either/ ipv6+vlan or ipv6+pppoe but not both!). This resulted in the router effectively locking up whenever there was any non-trivial amount of IPv6 traffic. I looked around for a suitable replacement, and I ended up getting a good deal on an Alta Labs Route10 which was an ex-review unit. What follows is my experience so far.

Good:-

• The router feels like a quality device
• I was up and running quickly
• Good IPv6 support
• Two SFP+ ports and four 2.5G ports

Not so good:-

• There is nowhere to configure static routes
• You cannot set MTU on a specific interface (e.g. 1508 for WAN) - you can only enable "jumbo" frames on LAN
• You cannot configure local addresses (e.g. unique local unicast)
• The zone-based firewall seems limited to WAN and LAN zones
• Requires a controller, either in the cloud or self-hosted
• The self-hosted controller is not easy to manage (e.g. the docker container has no data volume to make manged upgrades easy)
• Managing dhcp reservations is fiddly
• You cannot disable the DHCPv6 server or manage reservations whatsoever
• It lacks common configuration management features you would expect (e.g. show | compare, commit confirmed, write memory, etc)
• The power supply is an uncommon 54V DC to the inclusion of PoE support - all my other networking gear is supplied from a single 12V DC PSU for which spares are very easy to obtain
• There is no console port - instead there is bluetooth

Despite all of the negatives, I am hopeful that most of the issues will be fixed via future software updates.

More information: https://www.alta.inc/route10

[Simon]

Thanks for your review!

[zappaDPJ]