AC1900 First Look: NETGEAR R7000 & ASUS RT-AC68U

[tlminh]

EDIT***********
2 hours after install

i'm just sitting here doing nothing and now its hovering at 175mbps

this is without touching any settings

EDIT*******
Next hour
Well, now it wont connect. It keeps saying my password is incorrect. But all my other devices connect just fine

I had to reinstall the driver, then it still say my password was incorrect x 1. After I clicked retry, it worked. Still at 175Mbps though

 

[Sky1111]

I tried the dd-wrt build at myopenrouter and it did not work, sometimes it will try to flash, other times it will complain, overall it is not a well made dd-wrt release

From my experience, (at least with the r6300V2), the openvpn is not very reliable in dd-wrt (for me, it kept failing to connect and when it did, it was extremely slow and would eventually stop working all together.)

For general routing and wifi performance, both tomato and dd-wrt have been slower than the offerings on the stock netgear firmware. (the only areas where they showed improvement was in USB storage performance)

I have mostly given up on 3rd party firmware, the drop in general routing performance, and the large drop in wifi performance, have made them less appealing.

Experiences vary...
- you are not the first person I hear about DD-WRT - feature rich, but buggy and slower
- however, people who use Padavan firmware will concur with me that by any measure Padavan firmware was as good performance wise, and much less buggy than stock
- Merlin firmware - ain't perfect (I blame ASUS for not sharing enough info with Merlin), but he has an army of followers

The truth is: for each person/use scenario, there is an optimal option...

What we need is an Ubuntu equivalent - someone with money to back up the open source development; organize and bring structure to it... (NSA, please stay out of it - LOL)

For example, it is clear that there is a market demand to have a VPN Client support on the router itself with an option for selective MAC routing. To make it happen for current internet speeds - (lucky people on this thread boast 100Mb service), a quad core low power SoC is required with VPN client optimized for multithreading ...

Sorry - I sort of moved away from the topic... just venting out

 

[arias]

If it is affordable, and VPN is an considering factor, I would make a pfSense system/router with hardware offloading for VPN. I think you would get more mileage out of it. Personally, that is what I would have done long time ago but is still unnecessary for my needs.

http://www.pfsense.org/

Thanks Shikami, I agree pfsense rocks. I would have done that awhile ago too I just wish I didn't have to build another box with a vpn accelerator card just to do routing. It'd be nice to be able to find an easy out of the box solution, especially with the dual proc multi gig processing going on with present day routers I'd imagine *should* theoretically be able to handle it. I might have end up going that route anyway though.

Experiences vary...
What we need is an Ubuntu equivalent - someone with money to back up the open source development; organize and bring structure to it... (NSA, please stay out of it - LOL)

Ubuntu sounds like massive overkill, as nice as it would be. I've been out of following the 3rd party firmware scene for awhile now but what happened to ipkg? It's based on the debian/ubuntu packaging manager but is lightweight and designed for embedded devices. What happened to active dev for ipkg on dd-wrt and elsewhere? I always thought it held a lot of promise as far as debian based embedded distro package managers go. From what I can tell it was forked into opkg and is still being actively maintained in the google repository. If you can't find ubuntu for embedded devices I'd imagine ipkg/opkg could be a close second.

 

[Razor512]

Interesting. What are your speeds at when you run VPN server on your main box? And what kind of non-VPN speeds do you get?



Ideally yes. Or even just switching to using the other processor exclusively when the VPN dedicated processes gets close to to maxing its load could be a quick and dirty, albeit less efficient solution.



Really? That seems counterintuitive to me. Early development of any 3rd party firmware is going to necessarily be buggy. But the benefits after some time of active development should far exceed what you've come to expect from stock. That's assuming there's enough interest and critical mass to spur active dev of course.

For my main NAS system which I also use as a VPN server (running untangle in a virtual machine as it makes setting up openvpn insanely easy (easy setup wizard), it even generates a preconfigured installer that installs the client and sets everything up for 1 click access to the openvpn server, and it works for pretty much all major OS including android)

Since it is running on a virtual machine which bottlecks networking performance due to emulation, it tops out at 232Mbit/s in both directions
(the system running the VM only has 1 network adapter, and it uses virtual interfaces to be both a client on the LAN as well as providing access to the VPN client so there will be some overhead from that as well).

During the throughput test, the CPU usage tops out at 62%, with the actual openvpn process using about 20% CPU usage. (virtual box in this case is limited to 1 physical CPU core) as the computer is also used as a NAS, DLNA server, DVR for a 1080p webcam used as a security camera for the back yard (to enhance a standard 4 camera system), and occasionally, a game server)

(may seem like a lot but it handles it all with no problems)

while I am sure that it can do better, the running of it in a virtual machine is significantly bottlnecking the performance (which is well documented on virtualbox's website)

 

[RMerlin]

What we need is an Ubuntu equivalent - someone with money to back up the open source development; organize and bring structure to it... (NSA, please stay out of it - LOL)

That's pretty much what OpenWRT is. Open sourced to the core, with all the drawback that are associated to it (such as wireless performance or lack of support for new platforms). The project is fairly well organized.

 

[whsbuss]

Has anyone tried connecting a USB drive to both the 3.0 and 2.0 at the same time? I was wondering if I could connect a time machine formatted drive to 3.0 port and another NTFS drive on the 2.0 port.

 

[sm00thpapa]

Reading reviews on other sites of these 2 routers and the EA6900. Seems these 2 are fairly good and the EA6900 is a huge bomb. Nothing but bad reviews from all other sites.

 

[Asusnet]

RT-AC68U firmware update soon

Hi All,

There will be a firmware update soon that will address some of the issues users have experienced on the RT-AC68U, such as slow USB 3.0 performance and inconsistent 2.4ghz connectivity. The update may be available as early as next week. If anyone has any concerns or feedback regarding the RT-AC68U, please feel free to contact us at Networking_support@asus.com.

-Asus Networking Support

 

[tlminh]

Hi All,

There will be a firmware update soon that will address some of the issues users have experienced on the RT-AC68U, such as slow USB 3.0 performance and inconsistent 2.4ghz connectivity. The update may be available as early as next week. If anyone has any concerns or feedback regarding the RT-AC68U, please feel free to contact us at Networking_support@asus.com.

-Asus Networking Support

Hi Guys, I am trying to fix my PCE-AC68

I have a netgear R7000 router

It is refusing to acknowledge my 2.4 Ghz SSID password

It will link to my 5Ghz SSID, but it also has a problem recognizing the password. It will eventually connect after a few attempts, however, when it does, it will only link up at 175Mbps.

If I delete the PCE-AC68 drivers, and use my Asus USB-N53, it links to my 5Gz without a problem, and pushes 300 Mbps easily

The R7000 router has been working flawlessly with all other devices.

Any new drivers for the PCE-AC68 anticipated? I may RMA this soon if no fix is coming

Thanks!

 

[DigitAl56K]

While we are discussing the N53 USB and the R7000, I get 300Mbps link over 5Ghz, but never more than 144.5 on 2.4Ghz. Is this the best that this combination can achieve or is something wrong here?

I did try disabling 20/40 coexistence.

 

[Ziggy]

Hi All,

There will be a firmware update soon that will address some of the issues users have experienced on the RT-AC68U, such as slow USB 3.0 performance...

If the USB 3 port has a shielding issue, how will firmware resolve said issue? Thanks.

 

[sebna]

Hi Tim,

Does R7000 supports 3g USB modem internet connection sharing like RT-AC68u does?

Thank you,
seb

 

[s1000rr]

Can someone point me to a link that shows all of the R7000 UI pages?

I want to know if this router supports port forwarding; a feature missing from my WNDR3700.

Edit: I found some information in the owners manual. Looks like it does fully support port forwarding, where the external port can map to a different internal port.

 

[PrivateJoker]

Can someone point me to a link that shows all of the R7000 UI pages?

I want to know if this router supports port forwarding; a feature missing from my WNDR3700.

Here you go, looks like a yes.

http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/R7000/R7000_UM_25Sep13.pdf#page=146

 

[s1000rr]

Thanks Joker. Should have checked the obvious first.

 

[Asusnet]

If the USB 3 port has a shielding issue, how will firmware resolve said issue? Thanks.

The issue is software related, not hardware. Our own USB tests show much higher results from USB 3.0 drives ranging up to 40-50MB/s.

If anyone is experiencing speed issues or instability issues with your 3.0 drives, disable "Reducing USB 3.0 interference" under Wireless professional settings.


"Reducing USB 3.0. interference" is enabled by default, which will convert the USB 3.0 port to essentially a USB 2.0 port. Some USB 3.0 drives may not currently work with this setting enabled.

 

[whsbuss]

The issue is software related, not hardware. Our own USB tests show much higher results from USB 3.0 drives ranging up to 40-50MB/s.

If anyone is experiencing speed issues or instability issues with your 3.0 drives, disable "Reducing USB 3.0 interference" under Wireless professional settings.
View attachment 1564

"Reducing USB 3.0. interference" is enabled by default, which will convert the USB 3.0 port to essentially a USB 2.0 port. Some USB 3.0 drives may not currently work with this setting enabled.

Sorry but I am not buying this..... users including Tim who did the review tried disabling that in the UI and that's when problems happen (timeouts,dropouts,poor speed).

 

[Razor512]

Has he tried opening the router and modding in a shielding can to see if it works?

if there is enough space around the USB 3 circuitry to strip off some solder mask and then manually bend to shape, and solder in a shielding can, will it improve the performance?

 

[thiggins]

Has he tried opening the router and modding in a shielding can to see if it works?

if there is enough space around the USB 3 circuitry to strip off some solder mask and then manually bend to shape, and solder in a shielding can, will it improve the performance?

If "he" means me, no, I haven't. I haven plenty of other things to do.

 

[waqarz]

The issue is software related, not hardware. Our own USB tests show much higher results from USB 3.0 drives ranging up to 40-50MB/s.

If anyone is experiencing speed issues or instability issues with your 3.0 drives, disable "Reducing USB 3.0 interference" under Wireless professional settings.
View attachment 1564

"Reducing USB 3.0. interference" is enabled by default, which will convert the USB 3.0 port to essentially a USB 2.0 port. Some USB 3.0 drives may not currently work with this setting enabled.

Wao, official support directly weighing in, this has to be important