There’s a question that shows up in almost every engineering channel eventually:
“What’s the best router right now?”
“What’s the best firewall?”
“What’s the best protocol for DC fabrics?”
It sounds technical, but it isn’t. It’s the same question as “What’s the best smartphone?”, and it usually gets the same kind of useless answers. iPhone loyalists on one side, Android fans on the other, each convinced their choice is objectively superior without knowing anything about how you actually live or what you need.
When you choose a phone properly, you don’t start with the logo. You start with requirements: a battery that lasts all day, specific apps that must run well, a screen you can read, a camera that doesn’t embarrass you, and a device that doesn’t shatter the first time it hits the floor. Only then do model names and spec sheets become meaningful.
Network engineering is no different. Asking “What’s the best router?” or “What’s the best protocol?” without spelling out scale, failure domains, services, operational model, observability needs, and economic constraints is just vendor fandom with better acronyms. If you want to operate like a principal engineer, you need something better than preferences: you need frameworks.
This article takes that simple smartphone analogy and turns it into a full decision-making playbook for network technologies. We’ll translate “battery” into capacity and performance envelopes, “apps” into protocols and services, “screen” into observability, “camera” into diagnostics, and “durability” into real failure behavior. Then we’ll layer on the tools serious engineers use, such as Quality Function Deployment (QFD), decision matrices, Pugh analysis, TCO and risk modeling, trade studies, and bake-offs, to show how you rigorously compare routers, protocols, architectures, and vendors without falling for hype.
1. Stop Asking “What’s the Best Router?”
If you hang around engineers long enough, you’ll hear the same lazy question over and over:
“What’s the best router right now?”
“What’s the best firewall?”
“What’s the best protocol for this?”
And it sounds a lot like another, equally lazy question you hear in everyday life:
“What’s the best smartphone today?”
Ask that in any room and watch the tribes form.
On one side, you have the Apple faithful:
“Obviously, the iPhone. Best ecosystem. Best camera. Best everything.”
On the other side, the Android crowd:
“Samsung Galaxy. Pixel. Whatever. More freedom, more customization, fewer walled gardens.”
No one is asking anything about you: your actual life, actual constraints, or actual needs.
It’s all brand, identity, and preference.
But when you strip that away, and you sit with the question seriously, the answer becomes much more boring and much more powerful:
“What’s the best smartphone?”
“It depends. What do you actually need it to do?”
The Smartphone Done Right: Requirements Before Opinions
In your own metaphor, you outlined a sane smartphone decision process; one that almost nobody uses, but everybody should.
You didn’t start with a brand. You didn’t start with “who has the best marketing campaign.” You started with requirements:
Battery longevity – I don’t want to recharge more than once a day.
App support – I need these specific apps to work well: WhatsApp, Telegram, LinkedIn, Instagram, Notion, a browser, Outlook, and a few others.
Wide screen – I enjoy a large, beautiful display with decent color reproduction.
Camera quality – I want genuinely good photos.
Durability – It shouldn’t crack if it slips out of my hand once.
That’s it. That’s your world.
Notice what you didn’t include:
You didn’t say “must be the lightest phone on the market.”
You didn’t say “must be the absolute cheapest option.”
You didn’t say “must run this brand because that’s what my friends use.”
Weight might matter for someone else. Cost might be the primary constraint for someone with a different budget. Another person might care about gaming performance, stylus support, or specific accessibility features.
For you, these five criteria are your definition of value.
Once those are written down, the argument “iPhone vs Samsung vs Whatever” completely changes. You’re no longer asking:
“Which is objectively the best phone on the planet?”
You’re asking:
“Given my requirements and my constraints, which phone is the best fit?”
“Best” is no longer an absolute. It’s best-for-purpose.
You might end up with an iPhone. You might end up with a Galaxy. You might land on another Android device that nails battery life and durability while being “good enough” on camera and apps.
The key insight is this:
Until you define what you actually care about, the question “What’s the best X?” is meaningless.
The Router Question Is the Same Bad Question in Disguise
Now translate this to our network engineering world.
People say:
“What’s the best router for a new ISP?”
“What’s the best firewall for a DC edge?”
“What’s the best protocol for DC fabrics?”
“What’s the best SD-WAN solution?”
And the answers are usually just as tribal as the smartphone argument:
“Always Vendor X. Rock solid.”
“Vendor Y all the way. Better automation, better CLI.”
“EVPN is always the answer.”
“SRv6 is the future. Everything else is legacy.”
This is just fanboy culture in a different uniform.
They’re not answering for you. They’re answering for themselves, their habits, their biases, sometimes their certifications, or their last successful project. They’re reliving their previous wins and assuming your context is identical.
But in a serious network engineering setting, the real question isn’t:
“What’s the best router?”
It’s:
“What are we trying to build, under which constraints, for which traffic, with which reliability and operational model, and given all that, which router or architecture is the best fit?”
You already hinted at the complexity:
You care about feature availability and interoperability:
BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, MPLS, EVPN, SR-MPLS/SRv6, QoS, multicast, VPNs.
You care about scalability figures per feature:
Route scale, MAC scale, VRF scale, label scale, ACL scaling, and counters.
You care about reliability features:
ISSU, NSR/SSO, BGP PIC, FRR, stateful failover.
You care about systems integration:
APIs, gNMI, Netconf/REST, telemetry export, log formats, compatibility with your NMS/OSS/BSS.
On top of that:
You care about hardware architecture:
ASIC choice, buffer architecture, queuing, power and cooling, form factor, ports-per-rack.
You care about software architecture:
Monolithic vs modular OS, process isolation, crash containment, rollback model, configuration safety mechanisms.
You care about operational usage and safety:
How does it behave under failure? How does it behave under human error?
And beyond purely technical aspects:
You care about the reputation of that device class in the real world:
Known bugs and war stories in the operator community.
How it behaves under a loaded BGP table, not just in a lab.
You care about the vendor’s track record:
Support quality, TAC responsiveness, documentation, training, community, and roadmap.
You care about TCO and ROI:
Not just purchase price, but operational cost, incident cost, and lifecycle cost.
Ask “What’s the best router?” without specifying any of this, and you’re making the smartphone mistake at enterprise scale.
You’re asking for an answer in a vacuum.
“Best” Without Context = Hype, Politics, and Regret
Why is this so dangerous?
Because when you don’t start from requirements:
Decisions get made based on who argues better, not what the network needs.
People push their favorite vendor or protocol because “it worked well at my last job,” regardless of whether your constraints are different.
Leadership ends up signing off on expensive architectures with weak justification beyond “industry best practice” and vendor slideware.
When failures happen, nobody can trace back why this design was chosen apart from “we thought it was the best.”
It’s the same as buying a phone because “all the cool kids have one” and then discovering:
The battery doesn’t last your full workday.
The apps you rely on are buggy or missing.
The device cracks the first time it slips from your hand.
At the consumer scale, that’s annoying and expensive. At the network scale, it becomes:
SLA violations.
Major outages.
Burnt-out teams.
Wasted millions.
That’s why the smartphone analogy matters. It’s not a cute story; it’s exactly the same mental failure at different scales.
Until you do the work of saying:
“Here is what we need this network to do.”
“Here are the constraints and non-negotiables.”
“Here is how we’ll measure success.”
…you have no business asking “What’s the best router?”
You’re just picking colors and logos.
Let's take this metaphor further:
We’ll treat your smartphone requirements like a proper engineering requirements doc.
Then we’ll translate that into the language of routing protocols, DC fabrics, firewalls, and backbone gear.
And we’ll layer on the actual frameworks: QFD, decision matrices, Pugh analysis, TCO, risk models, trade studies, bake-offs that serious engineers use to get from “I need a phone that lasts all day” to “This is the right architecture for our next greenfield deployment.”
But it all starts here:
Stop asking “What’s the best X?”
Start asking, “What do I actually need—and how do I compare options against that?”