Looking for feedback: PPPoE and poor WAN performance

[RMerlin]

High speed with PPPoE will always be tricky. It's not a matter of manufacturer, but the platform itself. Most likely that a Netgear also using the same Broadcom chipset would give you the same results as the RT-AC68.

 

[MonkY]

High speed with PPPoE will always be tricky. It's not a matter of manufacturer, but the platform itself. Most likely that a Netgear also using the same Broadcom chipset would give you the same results as the RT-AC68.

What other high end router do you recommend? Is there anything else but Broadcom (on AC1900 and higher routers)?

 

[RMerlin]

What other high end router do you recommend? Is there anything else but Broadcom (on AC1900 and higher routers)?

There's the Netgear R7500 which is a Qualcomm + Quantenna based solution. There might be a few others, but I never really kept track of them. The AC market is currently dominated by Broadcom as they were the first to market a 802.11ac enabled solution.

You could also consider using something like an RT-N56U or RT-N14 (Ralink-based) running as the router, and then use a 802.11ac-enabled router as an access point. Not sure if Ralink does have high performance PPPoE capability however.

 

[MonkY]

Isn't AC87U also driven by Quantenna? Although it also have a Broadcom BCM4360, i understood that one is only controlling the 2.4Ghz, while Quantenna is doing all the routing part, the WAN/LAN, USB & the 5Ghz. Am i right?

Did anyone in here tested AC87U on PPPoE?

 

[RMerlin]

Isn't AC87U also driven by Quantenna? Although it also have a Broadcom BCM4360, i understood that one is only controlling the 2.4Ghz, while Quantenna is doing all the routing part, the WAN/LAN, USB & the 5Ghz. Am i right?

Did anyone in here tested AC87U on PPPoE?

Quantenna only handles the 5 GHz radio, and nothing else. Routing, WAN/LAN and USB are all handled by the Broadcom BCM4709.

 

[MonkY]

Well, i found the major bug that caused the AC68U to drop speeds from 700Mbps to arround 300Mbps. You will not gonna believe where the culprit was! It's the damn MAC Clone (from WAN Menu - MAC Address - MAC Clone). If i set to clone my PC MAC, it saves the settings and everything goes down (upto 300Mbps). Just remove the MAC, hit Apply, and then voila... back to over 700Mbps. Speeds. Unbelievable... hope you can fix this RMerlin! And i hope this was helpfull.

 

[RMerlin]

Well, i found the major bug that caused the AC68U to drop speeds from 700Mbps to arround 300Mbps. You will not gonna believe where the culprit was! It's the damn MAC Clone (from WAN Menu - MAC Address - MAC Clone). If i set to clone my PC MAC, it saves the settings and everything goes down (upto 300Mbps). Just remove the MAC, hit Apply, and then voila... back to over 700Mbps. Speeds. Unbelievable... hope you can fix this RMerlin! And i hope this was helpfull.

There is nothing for me to fix there, it's an ISP-specific thing.

 

[MonkY]

There is nothing for me to fix there, it's an ISP-specific thing.

You might be right, but i don't think it's ISP specific, as on AC66U it works even after i clone my PC MAC...

 

[RMerlin]

You might be right, but i don't think it's ISP specific, as on AC66U it works even after i clone my PC MAC...

It depends on what MACs your ISP have on their system. It's not the first time I see someone having performance issues until they changed their MACs. Some people had to clone the MAC to resolve their issues, others like you have to remove it.

 

[jonkul]

Confirmed, deleting the MAC address in the MAC address field gave me all my speed back again. Thanks for figuring that out!

 

[Chrysalis]

the question which doesnt seem answered here, is that is the ac68 faster than the ac66 for pppoe (especially with CTF disabled?

Does wan to lan performance scale over 2 cores, as the per core power seems equal to the ac66.

 

[RMerlin]

the question which doesnt seem answered here, is that is the ac68 faster than the ac66 for pppoe (especially with CTF disabled?

Does wan to lan performance scale over 2 cores, as the per core power seems equal to the ac66.

Beside the second core, single core performance is also quite improved with these newer ARM processors.

 

[Chrysalis]

yeah sorry my mistake, so I guess circa 33% improvement if pppoe is core limited and per clock performance is equal (worse case scenario)
if also enabling QoS I would like to think in the worst case scenario the idle 2nd cpu would handle the QoS so performance with QoS+ctf disabled on the ac68 should be way better than the ac66.

Ok ordering it today and will sell my ac66

thanks

 

[OrangeCrush]

I just had gigabit fiber service installed and was planning on using a newly acquired AC68 to handle the PPOE+VLAN tagging and wireless duties. (The router provided by my ISP was able to do >900M WAN-to-LAN, but I wanted better wireless capabilities than it offered.) Once I switched to the AC68, I was initially only seeing 300M. Thanks to the great advice in this thread, I removed the MAC address in the clone MAC field and performance jumped to ~700M.

I had read a post on another forum that someone was able to do >900M with the AC87 using the same ISP, but given the WAN-to-LAN benchmarks here on SNB, I am skeptical that upgrading to AC87 would do much better than I have now. Unless somebody convinces me otherwise, I think I'll stick to using the ISP-provided router for PPOE and the AC68 in WAP mode.

Thanks to MonkY and jonkul for posting the solution for my PPPOE woes, I never would have figured that out on my own.

 

[Chrysalis]

You can do 900mbit according to what I read but you will need CTF enabled for those kind of speeds.

For some data on a ac66 with CTF and pppoe 70mbit throughput used under 10% cpu.

 

[OrangeCrush]

Thanks for the tip. I'm pretty sure I verified that my NAT acceleration was set to "Auto" to enable CTF, but I'll double-check when I get home. I guess I also need to switch to Merlin's firmware so I can actually verify that the hardware acceleration is actually turned on.

 

[Chrysalis]

per ip traffic monitoring has to be off as well as QoS and all filtering type stuff.

ok this is for information purposes for the community and merlin since he replied to my post yesterday.

If I watch the cpu performance in top using SMP mode, with full download speed (70mbit), ctf disabled. No QoS. Then one cpu goes to about 25% idle at its heaviest load, the other stays at 99% or so idle, so pppoe doesnt seem to balance load across cores, and is possible pppoe is one core limited in terms of performance.

 

[john9527]

Slightly off topic, but if you also run OpenVPN server or client, in Merlin (and fork) builds it will load to the second core. Gives a big boost over the single core performance (I measured a 50% throughput improvement with that change on AC68 running OpenVPN client).

 

[Chrysalis]

I observed today sometimes QoS and pppoe both load the same core and then I get core saturation, luckily throughput holds out and latency stays good, so its not as bad as the ac66 still but the cores dont always load baalnce with both qos and pppoe.

I think asus still need to do a lot of work on pppoe performance, and I dont know why isp's are persisting with pppoe for super high speed broadband.

 

[oloco]

Hi.

Same issue with WAN speeds here:

RT AC-68U
Merlin 380-58
FTTH Fiber (300Mb/30Mb)

When connected my laptop directly to ISP Router in bridged mode, and dialing with laptop, I get full speed for uploading and downloading
When connected my laptop directly to ISP Router in client mode, I get full speed for uploading and downloading
If I connect my asus router to the ISP router (bridged mode or client mode), and I connect my laptop to Asus, I cannot get more than 5Mb to Download, but I get full upload speed (30Mb)

Everything tested with CAT 6 cable

I tried to delete nvram and install merlin firmware again, but same issue

So, in my case, doesn't matter if my asus has to dial pppoe, or it's connected via dhcp... download speed will never get more than 5Mb/s, even if UPLOAD GETS 30Mb/s!!

I'm trying to find some friends to test my router in his home, but, in the meanwhile... Is there any test that I can do in order to fix it? (Nat acceleration is enabled, as Merlin asked to check some posts before)

Thank you very much.

Regards