Best router for a symmetric Gigabit connection

[netgem21]

Hi there! I'm currently using an Asus AC68U for my symmetric gigabit connection and—whilst I'm certainly not complaining—it seems to take around 300mbps off my connection speed (both wired and AC wireless), presumably due to limitations in the CPU/RAM.

Does anyone have any go-to recommendations or experience with routers that are particularly good for making the most of a gigabit connection? Most of my devices are wired but very good 802.11ac performance would be desirable too.

Many thanks!

 

[thiggins]

Start by checking this chart.

 

[L&LD]

There are currently no consumer routers that will give a simultaneous 2Gbps up/down performance. Particularly with any other options/features enabled or used.

The 3 year old plus RT-AC68U would certainly be the last router I would expect to do this, so your actual performance is expected.

The ASUS BRT-AC828M2 is expected to be shipping 'soon'. If you want to maximize your network's performance, this might be the equipment you need.

http://www.snbforums.com/threads/ne...-dual-wan-vpn-router.32839/page-2#post-265829

Other than the above, the only other consumer (Asus) routers I would be considering today would be the RT-AC3100 or the RT-AC5300, but they too will be limited it maximum throughput, depending on what options you use/enable. But they are available now and I would highly recommend them from my past experience.

http://www.snbforums.com/threads/sh...-go-with-the-rt-ac1900p-v3.34748/#post-281391

 

[pege63]

ASUS announces AC2600-class BRT-AC828 Dual-WAN VPN Wi-Fi router

For more information on the ASUS BRT-AC828 router, you can visit the official product page at this link.

 

[Trip]

I'd like to hope the AC828's CPU plus whatever hardware-acceleration would be able to get close to 2Gb/s... and hopefully Asus is able to offer all the features you aim to use turned on with that being the case. But if the past is any indication, that may not be true, and you might be left with another under-performer in the wired throughput department...

If that ends up being true, but your skill set is up to snuff, a sure-fire solution is to roll your own open-source router on a cheap/used x86 box, then use the all-in-one as just an access point, or run whole-house wifi like Eero, Orbi, etc. More expensive for sure, but your "core" routing/packet-handling will destroy most any consumer box for throughput, especially if/when you have to have to run all services in-software. Just a thought on a contingency plan, if the next BHR sh*ts the bed.

 

[L&LD]

Trip, maylyn already 'proved' that.

http://www.snbforums.com/threads/ne...-dual-wan-vpn-router.32839/page-2#post-265829

Notice the very low/non-existent CPU loads.

 

[Nullity]

There are currently no consumer routers that will give a simultaneous 2Gbps up/down performance. Particularly with any other options/features enabled or used.

Are you sure? According to most reports I've seen from people with gigabit WANs, they can fully saturate their connection with the ISP-supplied hardware, though I don't specifically remember any simultaneous upload & download tests...

I mean, it'd be a bit strange to buy symmetric gigabit and not even be able to achieve it with the supplied hardware.

 

[sfx2000]

Are you sure? According to most reports I've seen from people with gigabit WANs, they can fully saturate their connection with the ISP-supplied hardware, though I don't specifically remember any simultaneous upload & download tests...

I mean, it'd be a bit strange to buy symmetric gigabit and not even be able to achieve it with the supplied hardware

Folks give me a hard time over the Operator Equipment getting much better than it has been in the past...

Most of their CPE can carry rated speed...

 

[Trip]

Trip, maylyn already 'proved' that.

http://www.snbforums.com/threads/ne...-dual-wan-vpn-router.32839/page-2#post-265829

Notice the very low/non-existent CPU loads.

Interesting. Would like to learn more about what can run on the box while those numbers are being achieved, including QoS (and its feature depth), etc. I'd obviously assume high amounts of offloading going on, but the average user obviously won't care how it's being done, as long as it's delivering for their use-case. Make no mistake about it, if Asus or whomever can usher in more capable embedded SoC boxes, I'm all for it.

 

[sfx2000]

Make no mistake about it, if Asus or whomever can usher in more capable embedded SoC boxes, I'm all for it.

Asus is one of the few vendors that could leverage their other business sectors - bringing in a nice little Quad Braswell box is entirely within their realm...

QNAP and Synology would be others that could play this game - and there, just do it on the NAS itself...

My QNAP TS-453Pro could do something like this quite nicely - Quad Core Celeron J1900 with 4 intel NIC's - run the Routing portion as a container inside QTS itself... Synology would be similar.

 

[L&LD]

Are you sure? According to most reports I've seen from people with gigabit WANs, they can fully saturate their connection with the ISP-supplied hardware, though I don't specifically remember any simultaneous upload & download tests...

I mean, it'd be a bit strange to buy symmetric gigabit and not even be able to achieve it with the supplied hardware.

Sure, the supplied hardware can achieve the paid for speeds. With their very limited test setups (to their own servers) and with nothing past defaults configured.

If anyone here wanted that, they wouldn't have joined SNB, correct?

 

[System Error Message]

the best router for a symmetric gigabit connection is actually a mikrotik CCR or an x86 based router, mainly because of their versatility and can handle the speeds without needing any sort of hardware acceleration or trickery

For your use case it really depends on what you want from a router and what sort of features you use.

 

[sfx2000]

the best router for a symmetric gigabit connection is actually a mikrotik CCR or an x86 based router, mainly because of their versatility and can handle the speeds without needing any sort of hardware acceleration or trickery

erm - maybe, maybe not...

TL;DR

When one gets to a gigabit symmetric connection, most of the "performance" problems are upstream outside of certain "speed test" sites...

In other words - even a BHR might be just fine - and most Gigabit Operator CPE will be just fine...

The CCR is a nice box - spent some time with one, and with some tuning, one can get excellent performance... steep learning curve, but this is ok, it's not a consumer box...

Same goes with my little pfSense machine...

I did take both of them into our lab where we have 40Gb carrier level connections sitting behind a Cisco Nexus Carrier Grade Router (9K if interested) dedicated to the lab just to see... so we can put a QoS service level, honest 1Gb connection there - so this is actually better that retail delivered to the home via fiber to the node or fiber to the home...

(FWIW, I do have access to this kind of connectivity via my regular day job)

Also brought along a consumer router with their firmware... (and no, that consumer box was not Asus - but results were brought to you my the letters "W" "R" "T", and the numbers one and 9...

Guess what - not too much difference with a single client emulating that 1Gb connection - and across the three boxes, performance was similar..

 

[MichaelCG]

I have Symmetric 1Gbps...and I can get it with the provided CPE. However, I run a pfSense FW for more features and can manage right around the 850-900Mbps mark through it which is plenty for my use. How often do I ever come close to using my entire bandwidth? About once a year when I am proving to a friend that I can. Otherwise it is rare that I go over 40-50Mbps....and more often sub-20Mbps.

 

[thiggins]

With TCP/IP and other overhead, I'd say you are doing pretty good. Maximum possible with TCP/IP is around 940 Mbps.

There are very few homes that can really use all that bandwidth. That's why many people don't buy Gigabit service if it is priced at a premium.

 

[effndc]

I am also trying to find adequate hardware for a home symmetrical gigabit connection, what I am finding is that none of the tests out there actually show the speed under real world or with PPPoE and WAN VLAN tagging, which many of the "fiber" carriers require. In my case I falsely assumed an Asus RT-AC68U would be better than my old RT-N56U...it wasn't. The RT-N56U (with 3rd party firmware) readily smokes the AC68U, the AC68U would be at 100% CPU saturation below gigabit unidirectional...where the RT56U is below 2% CPU load at gigabit unidirectional, and using synthetic tests (without PPPoE) I was able to get 1800Mbps bidirectional across it using iperf3 (one client and one server on each side of the firewall configured as it would for daily use other than PPPoE). I am returning my AC68U as it is way overpriced if I only use it as an AP, though it does have good signal propagation as an AP.

In my case the carrier "provided" (meaning they forced me to pay for this crap) is entirely inadequate. The "modem" they sold me is a Zyxel C1100Z, which is likely a perfectly adequate device for DSL but entirely inadequate for gigabit ethernet service. Lets not even get started at how horribly limited your configuration options are, or that it leaves some backdoor open to the carrier that could be compromised by a hacker later...it is just a bad piece of hardware to force a custom to buy for this level of service (thanks Century Link, really winning points there!). The WiFi is only 802.11n, how does that even remotely make sense as hardware to issue for a gigabit service contract? Even wired it doesn't seem capable of actually providing gigabit unidirectional, let alone symmetrically.

I have been looking at some of the new Mikrotik hardware, I am more than willing to fork over up to $500 for a quality router that actually can support me for many years into the future. The problem is back to the same thing, Mikrotik's benchmarks don't even include NAT functionality and they absolutely lack PPPoE tests...so it is on the user to find out if the PPPoE is all software based and single threaded or not based on their own testing. Being that Mikrotik claims to be carrier focused and offers PPPoE carrier side termination I would expect them to have more info on this published, but they don't.

Ubiquiti's routers look interesting as well, though they also lack any meaningful benchmark metrics...though at least they have an active community that has some real world testing to share.

I would go for pfSense if any hardware vendor had any performance benchmarks, and I realize I could do a DIY device built with older x86 hardware, however 24x7x365 power does add up and I am not going to run yet another 100W device continuously. How Netgate offers any hardware without metrics to go by is shocking, it isn't like they are all low cost items. I have a lovely Intel Skull Canyon NUC that could make a very capable (and rather expensive for the use case) firewall platform if it had more than 1 NIC, and using the USB NIC with pfSense has proven to result in kernel panics under any load. The N56U lacks any IPv6 firewall support in the firmware I have on it, and I'd rather not mess around with something that is underpowered just to get IPv6 firewall...so I am likely going to test my NUC with one of the open source firewall distributions and just accept that it also can't pass symmetrical gigabit as it only has a single NIC and will be passing all traffic over the single NIC using VLANs.

Some day I hope a benchmark exists that actually emulates the configuration that these higher bandwidth Internet services require, until then we are stuck with testing things ourselves and leveraging return policies from resellers or return protection from our credit cards.

 

[thiggins]

You don't see most reviews test routing throughput at all, let alone with PPPoE.
SNB hasn't run our routing throughput tests with PPPoE because most readers are far more focused on wireless performance, so that is where we spend most test time.

Our current test suite it more comprehensive than anyone else's and it already takes too much time, causing fewer products to be reviewed.

So the technology to do the testing is there. It's a question of priority, reviewer skillset and return on investment for spending the time to do the test.

 

[MichaelCG]

I have Google Fiber so I don't have to deal with the PPPoE issue nor crazy pricing. I haven't looked in a long time, but I was thinking my pfSense box is pulling under 55W 95% of the time. It is an older HP Business desktop with an E4600 in it with three Gigabit NICs. My pfSense box is also still routing through the Google CPE router.

I did a test today to confirm I was correct in my speed numbers and managed 896Mbps down and 942Mbps. Of course this wasn't at the same time, this was via Google's speedtest site using a single PC. Using multiple PCs, I have managed to peg this FW out with uploads and downloads. It just takes a lot of work to actually be able to generate that much inbound and outbound traffic to/from the Internet.

 

[RMerlin]

Our current test suite it more comprehensive than anyone else's and it already takes too much time, causing fewer products to be reviewed.

If I may ask, how many hours of work are needed for a single product review (assuming you didn't have to do any back-and-forth with the manufacturer to look into any oddities)?

 

[thiggins]

If I may ask, how many hours of work are needed for a single product review (assuming you didn't have to do any back-and-forth with the manufacturer to look into any oddities)?

If I do nothing but focus on one product, it takes about a week to run all the tests, get the data into the charts and write a decent review.
That is not all test time, of course.

But rarely do I get to focus on one thing at a time. (Who does?)