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Home Router For High-Speed Connection?

Posted by kdawson on from the beyond-consumer-grade dept.

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?"

3 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I would expect most brand-name ones would by pipatron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Thanks for the advice! Too bad it's incorrect and you apparently just wrote something to see your name here. There's no reason for the brand-name ones or any one (they all buy and rebrand from the same Chinese OEM developers anyway) to maintain speeds faster than the fastest broadband connections on the market. This has been cheap and easy so far, since the market in this case suck at delivering fast speeds.

    It's common knowledge among those of us that have 100/100 at home that those routers just can't keep up. They usually also lack RAM to track enough connections to saturate the bandwidth with torrent downloads or similar.

    I'd set up openwrt or distro-of-your-choice (m0n0wall was nice last time I looked at these things) on a small and silent PC with two network cards, mini-itx or such. That would give you the prestanda and flexibility you want.

    --
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  2. Re:The best by Honken · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Linux PC by Natales · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.