Not for that faint of heart or those with weak computing skills - this is not exactly a point-click-and-go operation, but is easily best router I have ever owned, let alone at anything near this price. I have a shelf full of various routers I have used over the years going back to the mid-90s when I first got on the internet including many recent ones in the last 3 years I have tried in order to solve streaming problems in a fairly busy home network.
The problem which drove me to continue experimenting in routing equipment was with HD video streaming through both an Amazon Fire TV box and a Google Chromecast dongle and an Amazon FireTV stick. On the gateway/router boxes I had tried up to buying this ERLite-3, I would frequently see pauses in the buffering of streamed video although mostly in evening primetime when the web is full of people streaming TV shows. I had previously experimented with managed switches to try to route traffic for the streaming devices more optimally. And that helped a little. I had isolated all wireless traffic into separate Wireless access points for each floor of my house, including disabling wireless activity on my main router so that it only worked on routing and not managing wireless accesses. Since that did not clear the problem I started another investigation into equipment that might better do the job of purely routing traffic. But the market is dominated by single box solutions focusing most strongly on ease of use and fancy-looking boxes designed to get fashion awards. Trying to find a gateway/router without wireless in today's network hardware market was like looking for a needle in a haystack. The few options mostly revolved around small-to-medium businesses looking for industrial grade solutions at higher price points - above that of the fashion-oriented wireless-included click-and-go solutions. But in that more commercially oriented group, the ERLite-3 stood out because of its price point under $100. So I did a more thorough search and found that it was generally highly-regarded for performance but somewhat cranky to configure. That evaluation is justified now that I've used it for four weeks - but its feature set and price point makes it, to me, a uniquely valuable product.
First - it is generally flawless in performance - once you do your initial setup so that it's running at all - it never fails. My streaming issues still occasionally occur in primetime but they never cause a problem with the router - it keeps humming along and resumes broken streams without a hitch. It has never locked up on me and required a power recycling to get working again. You can screw up the configuration and make it fail to connect or route properly but you can't make it freeze up, at least I haven't been able to do that - and I've experimented with at least 25 different configurations. The 3 previous consumer/router gateways I had used could all be made to lock up under some combination of video streaming and online game play, again mostly in prime time.
So from a performance and robustness of the base operating system, and its underlying hardware, perspective, this device is nearly flawless.
Where it suffers is only in that it is difficult and confusing to configure if you are trying to do anything for which there is not already a canned solution from Ubiqiti. This product has a much smaller user base than it deserves. And what that translates to is that the number of people who may have tried to do what you might want to do are few and far between or possibly non-existent so finding answers via support forums doesn't turn up that many hits. To do what I initially set out to do, use one of the 2 LAN ports for a high priority network for the video streaming devices and set up a second network out the second LAN port for regular traffic turned out to be impractical - but not because the box couldn't do it but because I could not find an answer that I could make sense of and I was in a hurry to restore the internet before my family started pounding on my door!
Although they provide an excellent GUI interface - frankly the best of any consumer router I have ever seen, they are short when it comes to Wizards that will help you with anything out of the ordinary. You can get it up and running with the Wizards they provide easily enough but to get it to sit up and bark you're going to have to go editing its master config.boot file - which is an XML-like plain text file describing the configuration. Unless you are familiar with the UNIX/LINUX vi editor, you're going to want to take that configuration file over to a familiar editing environment to experiment with changes and try out solutions others, including Ubiqiti suport, might want you to run for your specific issue.
But while this is a technical issue requiring some care to go through, ubiqiti has provided the tools in their GUI to make getting a copy of the current configuration copied to your PC and then restored to the router easy and straightforward.
To make changes to the configuration that are not covered by someone else's example config you might find on the internet, or if you want to apply suggested changes yourself, the process is simply this:
Use your browser to go to the router Web GUI at the base IP address of the router - I think it's 192.168.1.1 by default - mine I set differently. On each page of the interface you'll find two tabs at the bottom of the page on the left side named Alerts and System - click on the System tab and scroll to the bottom. There you will see the two options you'll need to fully control the configuration of the router. The download option will package up the current configuration and store it on your PC at the location you designate. The resulting file is commonly used in UNIX/LINUX software distributions consisting of a tar file that is gzip'ed. If those terms scare you, then you should probably not be looking at this router if you need to do anything out of the ordinary. For the most part, all of the options you will use for most operations are available somewhere in the GUI and could be set there but you will be going back and forth to multiple screens or alternately using their command line interface to set things up. After horsing around for a week trying to get my configuration where I wanted it I concluded the download/restore method was best. So you use the download method to get a copy onto your PC or MAC portable or desktop. You then use a free tool like 7-Zip to first unzip the file and then use 7-zip to de-tar the resulting tar file. Be aware that you should de-tar that file into it's own private subdirectory where nothing else exists. The tar file contains a complete copy of the configuration file structure with a lot of files and directories you will not likely ever touch. But when you're done editing config.boot you have to go thru the same 2-step process in reverse to create the file to restore the configuration file to the router. Sounds difficult and tedious but it's really not. it boils down to this - download using the GUI to your local machine in an empty subdirectory. Extract the tar file from the gzip, un-tar the tar file, which creates a 'config' subdirectory. Open the config subdirectory where you'll find a lot of stuff but all you care about is the config.boot file. Edit that with a plain text editor like notepad or it's plaintext Mac equivalent to see how things are currently set and then make your changes. Then close the file after editing. Now go back up one directory. Run 7-Zip to create a tar file from the entire contents of the config folder - 7-zip defaults to gzip - you need to change the type of file to tar. That should create a file called config.tar - you can rename it if you like - the name isn't important, only how it is created is important. Now run 7-zip or your favorite gzip creator program to zip up the .tar file you just made. Then use the configuration restore function of the ERLite-3 Web GUI to restore the file you just created. The Web GUI will ask you if you want to reboot the router after you restore and, of course, answer yes. Your changes will be applied during the reboot which takes a full minute or more. I've been thru this process a few dozen times now as I experimented with IPV6 configurations, bridging IP ports, putting in MAC address fixed assignments, enabling and disabling protocols and firewall features and so on and it was actually faster than using the WEB GUI overall and has the advantage of ensuring you always have a backup copy of a working router configuration.
Now if you've lasted this far into this review, here's the really cool part. The Web GUI will show you the traffic demand of any user on the system in a continuously updated moving stacked bar chart. It lists by color code each of the heaviest users active on the system so you can see who's using the most bandwidth - there are two parts to the display - the Dashboard tab with the vertical moving bar graph showing bandwidth by user over time - and the Traffic Analysis tab which shows a circle bar graph showing by color code what percent of total thruput a user is taking. And if you hover on a particular users Circle graph color, it will give you a list of the applications that user is running which are using the most bandwidth.
I have two kids - both adults, one of which still lives at home and the other is away at college. I've noticed that they tend to have something like 20 to 30 open windows on their desktop at any time when they're at home. I was amazed when I looked at the circle graph display and could see how many of their open applications were taking bandwidth when they were not actively being used. Easily the most useful traffic analysis display I've seen on any router at any price point. That display alone made the other "features" pale in comparison. You do need to enable "Operational Analysis" on the GUI to see the application details - a feature they caution you results in deep packet inspection which potentially slows packet delivery marginally. But that also shows another aspect of this hardware - it is truly high performance. If you search the web you find the ERLite-3 and its bretheren are some of the highest performing routers out there. In part because of the dual core processor used and in part because of the large buffer memory. They actually have excess processing capacity for the normal work so adding deep packet inspection doesn't slow them down. I'm pretty sure that it was slow internal CPU performance in my earlier routers that would eventually get them to lock up under load. So far, this guy hasn't hiccuped once.
Ubiqiti appears to be very proactive in keeping the software improved too. When you read reviews and comments and go to forums looking for information you find that are steadily adding features to their GUI to make it do more of the configuration management without having to resort the the method I currently use. So far, I have only done one upgrade after first receiving it. But when I read a lot of other posts regarding this equipment I read complaints about missing features and attributes that couldn't be seen that I now do see in the version I'm running, 1.7.0.
So in summary here's my take:
Pros
Fast, reliable, and more readily configurable and expandable in its feature set than any other router available at this price point.
Real-time traffic display unsurpassed in my experience.
Cons
Smaller user base than the big name products and definitely expert-friendly. I think the current Wizard for configuring it will accommodate most simple networks. But if you want to play with all the things it will do be ready for a very technical exercise.
Conclusion
I'd buy another one of these in a heartbeat based on reliability, configurability, and performance. It solved my problem and gave me more control of what goes on inside my network so I know what changes affect which behaviors.
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This Item  Ubiquiti EdgeMax EdgeRouter Lite ERLite-3 512MB Memory 3 Ethernet Ports Router | Recommendations  |  |  |  |  | |
| Price | $79.40 | $59.99 | -7% $139.99 List: $149.99 | -30% $34.90 List: $49.90 | $86.90 | -7% $119.89 List: $129.00 |
| Delivery | Get it Oct 4 - 11 | Get it as soon as Friday, Oct 4 | Get it as soon as Friday, Oct 4 | Get it as soon as Friday, Oct 4 | — | Get it as soon as Monday, Oct 7 |
| Customer Ratings | ||||||
| Sold By | Orange G (SERIAL N RECORDED) | Amazon.com | Amazon.com | GL Technologies | Farrera Shop | HNF TRADING |
| connectivity tech | Ethernet | Ethernet | Ethernet | Wi-Fi, Ethernet, USB | Ethernet | Wi-Fi |
| number of ports | 3 | 1 | — | 3 | 5 | — |
| data transfer rate | 3 gigabits per second | 1 gigabits per second | 1 gigabits per second | 1200 megabits per second | 1 gigabits per second | 1 gigabits per second |
| wireless standard | — | 802 11 AX | 802 11 AC | 802 11 AC | 802 11 AC | 802 11 A |
| frequency band class | — | — | — | dual band | dual band | dual band |
| lan port bandwidth | 30000 megabits per second | 10/100/1000 Mbps | 10/100/1000 Mbps | 10/100/1000 megabits per second | 1 Gbps | — |
| frequency | — | 5 GHz | — | 5 GHz | 5 GHz | — |
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Internal USB drive failed after about a year and a half
Just a note on my background. I work as a computer tech at a local college, who also repairs computers for close friends and family off to the side. So one note about this product, if you don't know the difference between Class A, B, and C private addresses, then this product is probably not for you.Anyway, I bought this router after having issues with Verizon's basic home router (Westell brand) because I had too many computers on it. The Verizon router would halt all traffic once every couple of days and had to be rebooted. I typically couldn't get the uptime past 3 days. To get the burden of the Verizon modem, I set that to bridge mode and let this thing handle PPPoe, DHCP, and everything after. Even handling the PPPoe this thing is using less than 20% of it's RAM.After setting this thing up by updating to the most current firmware, and using a wizard. I decided to tweak some settings to fit what I want it to do. I modified the IP range (changed to class B private addresses), and setup dynamic DNS on a namecheap subdomain. After that I setup PXE booting using CLI.This thing has flawlessly handled everything I've thrown at it so far. I had on average about 20-25 devices connected, with a peak of 56 devices; I have not seen RAM usage get past 19%. It's on a rural area DSL link of about 3Mbps. Cell networks here are limited to voice and text only, so I let any family members and guests use the Wifi. I have a medium end TP-Link Wireless-N AP, and on occasion I overloaded that, but never this router.Now despite having that much traffic this thing has never had to be rebooted. So far the uptime on the current session is exactly 3 months, 3 days, and 23 hours. It would be more but I was playing with settings and had to reboot to apply some changes, trying to get PXE to work on Realtek adapters.Overall I'd recommend this to tech savvy users who don't mind getting their hands dirty in CLI.Edit: 5/9/2016. On 5/8/2016 the EdgeRouter Lite failed after a regular reboot with no impending changes. I had to make my own DB9 to RJ-45 Cisco type adapter to be able to diagnose it, Note that the baud rate is different than the default (9600 that works by default with most CISCO products), UBNT products use baud rate 115200, Ubiquiti has the specs in their wiki. The issue ended up being the built in flash drive was getting corrupt (console output showed USB errors.) Thanks to the help of other fellow UBNT community members, I was able to get it working again. The flash drive can be replaced with most 4GB or 8GB flash drives, as long as they fit in the tight clearance inside of the Edgerouter Lite. I may do some later testing on using a USB extension to hopefully clear up the tight tolerance.The issue seems so common that the community members know what the issue is when they see the first console output capture.
