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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?"
My ISP links to http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/ which has throughput numbers for common home routers.
The long and short of it is that a lot of these devices have pretty poor performance, and can get away with it because they're used on 1.5mbps lines. However, there are some out there that are decent.
Of course, there's the build-it-yourself approach with m0n0wall or pfSense or something else. With a spare PC laying around you'll likely get reasonable performance, although electricity usage is quite a bit higher than an appliance.
... and use pfsense. My Intel CPU mini-itx board, with processor and ram was $100 and it works better than any consumer grade, BestBuy special router.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I second your opinion on using a PC. He may still run into a PPS rate limitation with the router though. It depends on how they bring the connection in. A friend of mine has a business FIOS line (20Mb/20Mb) and a /25 of static IP's, and I specified at install time that they had to bring it in by CAT5. They'll either install CAT5 or coax. I yanked their router off as soon as they finished the install, and put a Catalyst 2924 on. The speed was ok (but not great) with their router. It was exactly as advertised through the 2924.
For a NAT environment, a decent PC with Linux and iptables would be fine. It would obviously need decent interfaces (nope, that old 10baseT card won't do it), but it doesn't need lots of memory or even CPU power. A handy spare 1Ghz machine with 256Mb RAM is overkill, but easily available in most of our homes. :) The best part is, it's free. No need to waste money on new equipment, if you already have it sitting in your garage gathering dust.
I don't recommend exceeding 80% capacity on the interfaces. If they do offer 100Mb/s, it's time to upgrade to GigE interfaces. Again, that's pretty easy to do these days. You'll start running into problems at the PCI bus after a while, but that's over 100Mb/s.
Even in testing the 20Mb/s connection a couple years ago, I just started downloading ISO's. From any one source, I ran into their limitations, so I pulled one copy from a bunch of mirrors, and was able to saturate the connection to flatline at 28Mb/s (wheee). Their advertising was wrong, but I won't complain when they're wrong in my favor.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
stoppit, you're making badAnalogyGuy excited and hungry at the same time
I don't have an answer to your problem (other than "get a computer"), but you have my deepest sympathies. It is so hard to hear of my fellow human being having such horrific adversities inflicted upon them, and I cannot help but wonder: could this misfortune fall upon me some day?
I can only hope that you overcome the terrible burden of a 100 Mpbs internet connection thrust upon you and your residence, and somehow, god-willing, find a reason to keep on living, in order to set an example for others who may some day suffer the same fate. No matter how dark and hopeless things look right now, don't give up! If you can survive this calamity, maybe I can overcome my own problems as well.
Bless you, my friend, and good luck!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
I use a dedicated PC for my 100Mbps connection. An old PIII 800 computer with Gentoo. Works like a charm.
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