Question for Tim and others

[cc666]

I was looking at the RT-AC3200. I currently own a RT-AC87 and a Netgear R7000. So I did the following:

Setup the R 7000 in AP mode - connected HD to USB 3.0 - Hard wired to the RT-AC87 LAN port. Disabled the 2.4 ghz radio. Set 5.0 radio to LOWER. (channel 40)

Setup the RT-AC87 as the main router - 2.4 normal and 5.0 as AC used higher channel. The R7000 is hard wired to LAN 3.

Now is this setup theoretically better than the RT-AC3200? Its basically the same setup 1 - 2.4 GHZ - 2 - 5.0 GHZ. But has 2 separate CPU's doing the routing. I have all my AC clients on the RT-AC87 5.0 AC band. All N's to the R-7000 5 GZ radio and all others on the 2.4. I ran a simultaneous stream to 5 computers and it ran smooth as silk.

What are your thoughts?

CC

 

[azazel1024]

You don't have two CPUs doing the routing. Only the one functioning as a router is routing, the other one is merly doing switching and wireless duties.

Its roughly equivelent to settings things up so that the AC3200 Asus router is not using "smart connect". Your devices will be deciding which base station/band to connect to, unless you choose to setup different SSIDs for each one.

Frankly its a pretty crudy setup IMHO.

Then again, I also am not a big fan of the AC3200 routers. In theory, they could be good, but in practice it seems like they've got some issues going on. What you'd likely be better off doing is setting up a seperate 5GHz SSID for 11n devices and then one for 11ac devices.

Or you can recognize that in a lot of cases, you aren't going to have a whole slew of devices being highly active at one time. The performance penalty for something like an iPad 2 streaming netflix on your wireless network is pretty minor.

My wife spins up Netflix on hers and the performance from my N600 AP (if it happens that my laptop and her tablet both happen to be on the same band at the same time and connect to my AP) drops from ~25MB/sec if I am in the same room with my laptop as the AP, down to around 21MB/sec.

Now, sure, if she is transfering a file to her iPad 2 from the server or something, I see a much bigger hit, but even then I might still might be managing 14-16MB/sec to the laptop while her iPad 2 is getting ~3MB/sec to/from the server (that's about the most it can manage for SMB transfers, even without other wireless devices active).

There is a bigger hit if it is my router which is 11ac. Then if she is streaming and happens to be on the same band (5GHz lets say) my performance drops from 55-60MB/sec down to ~50MB/sec and if she is doing a file transfer it might get knocked down further to 42-45MB/sec.

Yes, I wouldn't mind if it got band steered away and didn't interfere at ALL, but the performance penalty is relatively minor.

Even in a "worst case" for my household which has both my son's streaming netflix to their android tablets and my wife pulling pictures off the server or something I've never seen 5GHz 11ac (if I am still same room or ajoining) drop below 40MB/sec and on my N600 router I've never seen it drop below 13MB/sec. In general numbers are MUCH higher, in part because it is rare that all of their devices happen to actually be on 5GHz. Often times looking at device assignment I'll see maybe 2-3 other devices on 5GHz with my laptop, and those are often our phones, occasionally it is one of the tablets (or my tablet), the others are on 2.4GHz...and there often are not more than 2-4 "active" devices on wireless (streaming/file transfers, heavy webpage traffic) and odds are good, there might only be one other device on the same band as my laptop that is active.

Then add up that there is an AP serving one side of my house and the router on the other and the odds go up that one or more devices, even if ON the same band, also happen to be connected to a different base station on a different channel....

Anyway, a long way of saying I feel a lot like dual radio (for the same channel) routers are a bit of a solution looking for a problem. You are MUCH better off trying to divide things up by zones and cover each zone with its own access point/router as well as rely on a bit of spread across the bands, instead of having all wireless devices on just one band. I don't seperate my network with distinct SSIDs and I find that they generally do a decent job of connecting to different bands.

Sure, I look at band assignment sometimes (the rare times I do, generally only if I am specifically testing something) and I can occasionally see 6 wireless devices on one band and a single wireless device on the other band, but most of the time I'll see 2-3 on one band and 3-4 on the other band.

 

[thiggins]

It's a valid setup and appears to be working well for you, so I'd call it good and not worry about whether it's "better" than Smart Connect.

The only thing I would suggest is to separate the two routers by six feet or more. This will keep the 5 GHz radios from overloading each other. Yes, you have them transmitting on different 5 GHz channels, but the receivers are working on all channels.

Note that AC devices drop back to lower link rates as signal levels drop. So if you have a stationary AC client that gets a weak signal, it might be better to move it to the radio with the N devices.

 

[jegesq]

You don't have two CPUs doing the routing. Only the one functioning as a router is routing, the other one is merly doing switching and wireless duties.

Its roughly equivelent to settings things up so that the AC3200 Asus router is not using "smart connect". Your devices will be deciding which base station/band to connect to, unless you choose to setup different SSIDs for each one.

Frankly its a pretty crudy setup IMHO.

Then again, I also am not a big fan of the AC3200 routers. In theory, they could be good, but in practice it seems like they've got some issues going on. What you'd likely be better off doing is setting up a seperate [sic] 5GHz SSID for 11n devices and then one for 11ac devices.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the original post or I'm just not getting your point (other than that there aren't two CPU's handling routing duties, which would be correct) is that your reply suggests the OP hasn't set up two separate SSID's for 802.11n and 802.11ac devices. But as I read the OP, that's what it looks like he's done, i.e., the R7000's 5ghz SSID channel has only 802.11n devices connected to it (and presumably it's set to 11n only and not mixed n+ac), and the 87U's 5ghz channel is handling only 11ac devices. It's not clear from the OP whether he's actually using separate SSID's for each of these 5ghz channels, but it would clearly make sense to use different identifiers (such as "5ghz-1" and 5ghz-2") just like the AC3200 does to keep straight which radio a device is connecting with so the user will at least be able to tell the difference easily. Is that what you were getting at?

 

[cc666]

Yes

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the original post or I'm just not getting your point (other than that there aren't two CPU's handling routing duties, which would be correct) is that your reply suggests the OP hasn't set up two separate SSID's for 802.11n and 802.11ac devices. But as I read the OP, that's what it looks like he's done, i.e., the R7000's 5ghz SSID channel has only 802.11n devices connected to it (and presumably it's set to 11n only and not mixed n+ac), and the 87U's 5ghz channel is handling only 11ac devices. It's not clear from the OP whether he's actually using separate SSID's for each of these 5ghz channels, but it would clearly make sense to use different identifiers (such as "5ghz-1" and 5ghz-2") just like the AC3200 does to keep straight which radio a device is connecting with so the user will at least be able to tell the difference easily. Is that what you were getting at?

Yes I am using separate SSID's, one is Asus AC and the other is Netgear 5.0.

CC

 

[cc666]

Thank You

It's a valid setup and appears to be working well for you, so I'd call it good and not worry about whether it's "better" than Smart Connect.

The only thing I would suggest is to separate the two routers by six feet or more. This will keep the 5 GHz radios from overloading each other. Yes, you have them transmitting on different 5 GHz channels, but the receivers are working on all channels.

Note that AC devices drop back to lower link rates as signal levels drop. So if you have a stationary AC client that gets a weak signal, it might be better to move it to the radio with the N devices.

Tim, thank you for the reply. Everything working perfectly except now I am getting this in my Asus log:

Feb 13 14:58:39 kernel: device br0 entered promiscuous mode
Feb 13 14:59:41 kernel: device br0 left promiscuous mode
Feb 13 15:11:19 kernel: device br0 entered promiscuous mode
Feb 13 15:12:21 kernel: device br0 left promiscuous mode

What the heck is that?

CC

 

[jegesq]

Tim, thank you for the reply. Everything working perfectly except now I am getting this in my Asus log:

Feb 13 14:58:39 kernel: device br0 entered promiscuous mode
Feb 13 14:59:41 kernel: device br0 left promiscuous mode
Feb 13 15:11:19 kernel: device br0 entered promiscuous mode
Feb 13 15:12:21 kernel: device br0 left promiscuous mode

What the heck is that?

CC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promiscuous_mode

It can be entirely benign, or malicious:

From the Wikipedia article

As promiscuous mode can be used in a malicious way to sniff on a network, one might be interested in detecting network devices that are in promiscuous mode. In promiscuous mode, some software might send responses to frames even though they were addressed to another machine. However, experienced sniffers can prevent this (e.g., using carefully designed firewall settings).

An example is sending a ping (ICMP echo request) with the wrong MAC address but the right IP address. If an adapter is operating in normal mode, it will drop this frame, and the IP stack never sees or responds to it. If the adapter is in promiscuous mode, the frame will be passed on, and the IP stack on the machine (to which a MAC address has no meaning) will respond as it would to any other ping. The sniffer can prevent this by configuring his or her firewall to block ICMP traffic.

In short, promiscuous mode is when your ethernet device (card, router, etc.) card accepts ALL traffic it receives. It's used when you're running a program like Wireshark to listen to the network (most effective in a hubbed network, or on a mirror port on your switch). Or it can be malicious, as when a tarball is downloaded, gains root access to your LAN and sniffs out passwords, keystrokes or other info that is passed back and forth across your LAN.

Not to make you paranoid, but.... In your set up, you have the AP which is accepting all traffic it receives from the router and it's probably what's causing these log entries. I know I've seen them in the past with my setup in which I'm using an AC66U as a router and another one as a repeater; devices that are attached to the repeater aggregate MAC addresses and use the repeater's MAC, but each device still has its own IP, so all frames are passed on.

In other words, given your set up, I'm pretty certain it's entirely benign.