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Home Router For High-Speed Connection?
soulprivate writes "My cable company has recently begun to offer Internet access plans with speeds over 30 Mbps (60, 80 and 100 Mbps). However my D-link router is unable to go beyond 30 Mbps if I use NAT; it reaches 60-70 Mbps only if NAT is disabled. Is there any recommendation for a brand/model of residential router that is able to get more than 70 Mbps with NAT enabled? I have been looking for benchmarks or comparisons, to no avail. Does anyone know one? What are your experiences at home?"
The reason I would expect most brand-name ones to is the public embarrassment if they were caught out like that.
Now everyone is going to check their routers and if the Belkins and Linksys-by-Cisco and others are all super-slow when NAT is on it's going to cause some major embarrassments for the industry.
I expect you either have an inferior manufacturing run, an inferior model, or an inferior brand.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Second of all, shouldn't a gigabit router give you what you need? Or am I completely off-base here and missing something...?
Have you actually run one that fast? And not just routing over your internal network, but routing over the Internet at 30+ Mbps.
Running across the NAT firewall at those speeds is difficult even on a fast server.. These little WRT's and such have the equivalent of 8-bit 200 Mhz CPU's.
As for the OP, what cable service do you have? I'm guessing not in the US? 100 Mbps might be common in Japan or something but in the US that's like holy shiat speed.
You could do what I do: use a compact computer with two NICs (motherboard NIC plus a PCI 3Com NIC) as the firewall. Run Devil-Linux from a read-only device. Then, the inside of your firewall can be a gigabit switch. Devil-Linux is pretty easy to configure, although perhaps not quite as easy as a consumer firewall/router with a good web-based GUI. You can boot Devil-Linux from a CD drive, with a write-protected floppy holding your settings; you can roll a custom CD with the settings burned onto it; or you can use a write-protected USB flash drive for everything. No hard drive is needed.
Pro: Fastest possible throughput and lowest latency; excellent security.
Con: Will consume more electricity at idle than a consumer firewall/router box.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Absolutely true. Pfsense is awesome!
The challenge is keeping your "old server" hardware alive without having staff supporting/monitoring it.
Sure, good HW can keep churning for quite some time, but sooner or later the HD will die. Or the PSU will grow tired. Maybe a fan will die and leave the system overheated? When compared to a brand spanking new dedicated unit I believe one can get away with less human monitoring. Of course, as always, YMMV.
Then again, should you have the resources available, pfsense or m0n0wall are the bomb. Seriously.
How about using an old laptop, or a low-end refurb netbook. Either should have the processing power required, has low power consumption, and can run other services (media server) if required.
What website do you expect to give you more than a 30Mbps connection?!
Website(s) plural. The neat thing about the net is you can have mulitple connections going, which is extra neat if you have more than one computer. Me personally, I'd use that to sync with the server at work so I have a bunch of stuff at home to access. Fun stuff.
Frankly, though, I'm not sure why you're asking. "You're paying for a really fast connection, but couldn't you just settle for half of it?" How would you respond to somebody suggesting you disable one of your cores?
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Or you could be in a bad part of the 'net as far as Akamai or whatever distribution network you're using. When I download an ISO from MSDN, they're able to max out my connection, and I'm not on one of the "lite" connections.
Downloading from Windows Update, on the other hand, tends to run a lot slower. But that's because it's using BITS to transfer, even when it's in the foreground. Downloads from the developper's network, or direct download of manual patch files is unthrottled.
I installed DDWrt on my Linksys and noticed a speed decrease, although it's completely worth it as I no longer have to reboot it daily...
I've given up hope on those cheap routers. Sure, DD-WRT and Tomato are decent products, but they don't come close to a box with pfSense. Just pick up the smallest, cheapest and least power consuming ITX box you can find and install pfSense on it. You can control it all from the web browser. Best of all, it's based on FreeBSD.
I have a WRT54GL and a 100/10 conection as well, and I can also confirm that getting above 30-40 Mbps is difficult. With some tweaking seems to be possible to reach 50 perhaps, but then the CPU simply won't handle more traffic. Enabling QoS or other features will obviously decrease this value even more. At first I thought I might have misconfigured something, but after a lot of googling this really seems to be the capacity limit of these routers.
Looking for an alternative that's quiet, low power and linux friendly I came across the Routerstation Pro http://www.ubnt.com/products/rspro.php. It runs the same linux-based firmwares as the WRT line of routers, but with a CPU clocked more than 3 times as high, more RAM and expansion possibilities etc. I have not tested it yet though, but reviews seems promising, routing 100 Mpbs should not be a problem.
doesn't make sense anymore - those projects all took advantage of spare clockcycles which were being provided anyway, and not being used. Modern CPUs throttle themselves right down if they're not loaded, and running a project like that just makes them run at full power when they don't need to. I was running rosetta@home 24/7 on my Q6600, until I realised that it was thrashing my system's cooling so hard that it was making ~ 3x more noise than it needed to be. Luckily I shut it off before I did any mechanical damage to the fans and my system is whisper-quiet again.
Anyway, to bring this back on topic. OP could try rolling his own. (Note: I haven't done this, I don't know whether it would work, and those look frightfully expensive. It just looks like it would be a neat toy, and a geeky talking point)
FGD 135
I have 25/25 FiOS with the actiontec router. The Actiontec would often lock up after heavy BitTorrent sessions. (something about memory leaks in the routing tables i heard) Anyway I had the internet connetion switched from Moca (cable output) to ethernet and I run it through an old pentium 200 with 3 nics running ipcop 1.4.21 a 24 port switch and hung the router on after for wireless and Moca for the stbs. It has yet to crash, been up for over 2 years and I get full bandwith on nat on the clients . and over 10/10 on the wireless.
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I have had a lot of success both at home and at work (1000 users) running astaro over on intel. I use a 4 core box loaded with vmware esxi (free) so I also use it for a webserver, fileserver, and windows apps. Astaro is free for home use (up to 50 users I think) and has about every feature you could ask for (DNS, DHCP, intrusion protection, content filtering for the kids, email spam filtering, IM control, malware, AV scanning, etc). Take a look.
Yet another interesting alternative is to run your router on a VM. In my case, I also needed to have a file server, an Asterisk server, a web server, virtual desktop, etc, it made sense for me to also run the router on a VM. I built an i7 box with 12GB of RAM and 2x1TB disks for about 900 bucks, installed the free ESXi 4U1 and separate NIC cards for each interface and a virtual DMZ. The box is a rocket, and I now that covers all my needs with a single computer in the house.
Hardware costs are pretty much free for a PC that can serve as a router. Just yesterday I pulled a Compaq Presario with an Athlon XP 1900+ and 1GB of ram out of the trash. Works fine, minus no harddisk, but draws over 100W at idle so probably not a good router candidate.
I have an old P3-600E running as a router. I picked this particular one out of the scrap pile because the 2nd generation slotted P3's are pretty low power processors (all under 20W). I have it turn off the HDD when not needed, which is most of the time. It draws about 30W with the 2 dual NIC Intel ethernet cards I put in it. which is not bad. I figure it's costing me about $20 a year to run in electricity, well worth it for the flexibility it gives me.
It's been more than 4 years since 100Mbps connections became popular in Korea. Nowadays, almost all routers sold in Korea are 100Mbps ready. Best selling local brands like Iptime or Anygate and impoted models like Netgear WGR614SS are all advertised to support a 100Mbps connection. It's been discontinued, but even a new version (can't remember the version number) of Linksys WRT54G with 100Mbps support was introduced in Korea couple of years ago.