Linksys WRT320N Dual-Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router Reviewed

[Unregistered]

The articles says:
WAN - LAN
145.1
LAN - WAN
165.5
But what about LAN-LAN. I have a NAS connected to my current network and I'd like to know the built-in gigabit switch performance. Any help with that numbers?

 

[thiggins]

LAN to LAN performance is as fast as the clients connected to it can handle, i.e. wirespeed.

 

[Unregistered]

Thanks for the quick reply. So if I test using e.g. netio on two reasonably fast machines I'll max out the speed to the limit of the network cards/cpu on that machines? I'm asking cause I thought that the router's cpu/chipset speed will limit the lan to lan bandwidth in the same way it limits the wan to lan or lan to wan bandwidth.

 

[pender]

LAN to LAN is regular switch speed. It is determined by the performance of the components in the clients (mainly HDD write speed) upto the 1Gbit threshold (with perhaps 5% reserved by the switch for QoS purposes).

 

[Unregistered]

Thanks for the answers. I saw that article: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30195/51/ comparing different gigabit switches and that's why I decided to ask. So what you're saying is that the WRT320N's gigabit switch performance is generally in that 600-700Mbps area? And that its speed actually is not slowed down by the router's chipset? If so - that's more than enough for me.

 

[thiggins]

So what you're saying is that the WRT320N's gigabit switch performance is generally in that 600-700Mbps area? And that its speed actually is not slowed down by the router's chipset?

LAN to LAN performance is as fast as the clients connected to it can handle.

In the article you referenced, the two computers used to do the measurement limited the speed to 600 - 700 Mbps. The bottom line is that the switch chip, not the router's processor, determines LAN to LAN speed.

 

[zjohnr]

Just checking to see if I understand ...

LAN to LAN performance is as fast as the clients connected to it can handle, i.e. wirespeed.

So what I think you are saying is ...

The LAN-LAN (wired) switch in the router attempts to be just that: a switch. When two clients are connected by the switch it is essentially the same as if they were directly connected by a cable with no router. There is probably some overhead to do the switching, but apparently it is so minimal as to not be worth worrying about.

OTOH, WAN <-> LAN almost certainly involves NAT processing of the data frames. That is not trivial overhead and is limited by the power of the router's ability to process/crunch data.

More or less correct?

Out of curiosity, is NAT the most significant "overhead" process affecting WAN <-> LAN?

-irrational john

 

[thiggins]

John, your understanding of the switch's function in a router is correct.

Hard to say what the dominant compute load is in the routing section. Depends on the feature set.

 

[Unregistered]

Hello,

I am about to buy this router for my IPTV + 100Mbit connection on both DL and UL side. For this I need router that has these functions:

multicast routing
IGMPv2
IGMP immediate leave
DNS suffix forwarding
QoS

Therefore I would like to ask whether this router has these. Thank you for your answer.

CZNeo

 

[zjohnr]

Huh?

@CZNeo

I don't understand your question. I think it would help if you provided more context about your network and about the application(s) you intend to use the router with.

I don't know if this Linksys router has any type of support for multicast, but I would doubt it.

This router is targeted for a small network in a home or SOHO. The last I had heard was that multicast just wasn't being used in that environment. Supposedly ISPs consider multicast to require too much overhead. I believe that ISPs block multicast packets from their networks.

That was quite a while ago though and things may have changed ... (I just don't get out and about as much as I used to ... )

-irrational john

 

[claykin]

Hello,

I am about to buy this router for my IPTV + 100Mbit connection on both DL and UL side. For this I need router that has these functions:

multicast routing
IGMPv2
IGMP immediate leave
DNS suffix forwarding
QoS

Therefore I would like to ask whether this router has these. Thank you for your answer.

CZNeo

Many routers have IGMP (multicast) support. In the case of Dlink, they include a multicast enable/disable checkbox option. Cannot say for sure that its anything more than IGMP V1. Can you check with the vendor of your IPTV to see what routers they approve?

 

[Unregistered]

Sadly I can't... they say it's not supported service and that's it. So I have to try it on my own. They've provided me with classic switch 10/100 and ethernet cable. Because of the speed I need to get rid of that switch, so I was thinking about GLAN Router to replace both their switch and my old router. Unofficial support discussion board said I need those features to get everything to work. I'm just a n00b in this so I need clever people like you to decide

 

[thiggins]

My observation is that multicast features in consumer routers are probably not very well proven. Multicast may be more used outside of the U.S. But when we wrote about it last year, it was hard to find examples of multicast in use.

 

[Unregistered]

Well, I finally bought it and IT WORKS... works well with IPTV

 

[bliko]

I just bought this router to use with a 24Mbps (19.5Mbps Real Throughput) internet connection. I loaded on dd-wrt, however don't have any extra services aside from dhcp enabled. And the cpu maxes out when WAN > WLAN approaches 13Mbps, anybody know the reason for this? I've tried with a several different numbers of connections upto about 200, but doesn't seem to make a difference, maxes out at 13Mbps. If I just use the wireless connection, and use the router as an acces point (no nat), then I can easily burst the internet connection, and cpu usgae on the router is only 10% at the very maximum (typically ~ 3%).

 

[DaveMcLain]

I know I've read somewhere that firmwares like DD-WRT often times are more CPU intensive than stock firmware. It seems that I read about this on the WRT54G whereby the fastest firmware was the stock Linksys, second best was Tomato and 3rd was DD-WRT just because it offers so many features built in. I just wonder if this might be the result of an early build for this model of router and that DD-WRT on the WRT320N will improve greatly in the future. I just bought a WRT320N and I'm still using the stock firmware. I don't need a lot of adavanced features in this installation so I'll probably just leave it alone.

 

[Unregistered]

The review results was with v1.0 firmware, any WAN to LAN speed improvements with the latest firmware build? Or any custom firmwares?

I've WRT160NL. It did just 50Mbps with the latest Linksys firmware and it runs at maximum 100Mbps with DDWRT now.
So I guess firmware makes a huge difference. Would like to know would WRT320N reach over 200Mbps WAN to LAN with some other firmwares? Or what similar not expensive, but stable routers like linksys would do that?

 

[k_nenad]

Wireless performance

Hi all,

I have a question about WRT320N wireless performance.
My unit is set to work in the 5GHz band, and I have connected a laptop (HP dv6, wireless adapter is Broadcom 4322AG) with Vista 64 and a desktop PC with Linksys WUSB600N adapter and XP. The connection speeds show 300Mbps for the laptop and 180-240Mbps for the desktop (it's in another room). When I try to copy a 1.5GB file from the laptop to the desktop, the transfer speed is between 5-7MB/s, which I think is lower than it should be with this setup.
What could be the cause for the low performance?

Thanks

 

[zjohnr]

the link rate is not an actual transfer rate

The connection speeds show 300Mbps for the laptop and 180-240Mbps for the desktop (it's in another room). When I try to copy a 1.5GB file from the laptop to the desktop, the transfer speed is between 5-7MB/s, which I think is lower than it should be with this setup.
What could be the cause for the low performance?

Take a look at the first point discussed in this article.
5 Ways To Fix Slow 802.11n Speed

-irrational john

 

[k_nenad]

Take a look at the first point discussed in this article.
5 Ways To Fix Slow 802.11n Speed

-irrational john

I'm aware of that, I just did a quick test with a file copy, but I expected better transfer rate. 7MB/s = 56Mbps, is that OK for a wireless N network with a good-excelent signal strenght?