Router choice for GB fiber connection.

[mikaelo]

Moved from Other LAN?WAN section:

I'm about to have ATT 1Gb fiber installed in my house and want to use my own router for several reasons.
The following will be a representation of the network topology I have in mind.

Now the location where all the Cat5e converge and where I want the ATT RG (their router, which will be configured in bypass mod) installed, is not a very good location for Wireless propagation, so it will be a wired connection only router(WiFi disabled) and Router/Access point 2 will be the main WIFI AP with then R/A 3 will fill-in in the basement level.

I currently own/have a Asus Rt-n65U and a Asus RT-AC1900 (T-mobile Cell spot, RT-AC68U like hardware i believe), where currently the N65U is sitting in a box...but my questions are:

1. Would the RT-N65U similar to the RT-AC1900 in wire routing performance or is the newer router significantly faster?
2.Should I skip the nice small energy efficient devices and get/build a dedicated router?
2b. If so what would you get on a budget to run as a Gb router?

Thanks four your consideration.

Mike

 

[pete y testing]

1. Would the RT-N65U similar to the RT-AC1900 in wire routing performance or is the newer router significantly faster?

your answer will be found in the link below

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router/view

as you can see even the fastest routers available are not going to be fast enough to handle that giga fiber ethernet connection and thats with all the services turned of for testing , once things like qos and routing are enabled its much slower

2.Should I skip the nice small energy efficient devices and get/build a dedicated router?

if you want the full speed of that connection your going to need to

of course your wifi isnt going to get any where near the speed of the fiber anyway so it depends on how much money you want to throw at chasing that speed over ethernet

2b. If so what would you get on a budget to run as a Gb router?

whats a decent new comp going to cost you with some gateway type software installed

 

[mikaelo]

If you want the full speed of that connection your going to need to
Of course your wifi isnt going to get any where near the speed of the fiber anyway so it depends on how much money you want to throw at chasing that speed over ethernet

I have access to a small form factor device with the following specs:
Atom D2550 1.86 GHz Dual Core with HT
Dual Intel® 82574L GbE LAN

Would that outperform the Asus routers if I installed something like pfSense?

 

[pete y testing]

Atom D2550 1.86 GHz Dual Core with HT
Dual Intel® 82574L GbE LAN

Would that outperform the Asus routers if I installed something like pfSense?

i would say throughput wise yes , of course you would need a second ethernet port in it to then feel a switch and onto the access points

 

[mikaelo]

I have access to a small form factor device with the following specs:
Atom D2550 1.86 GHz Dual Core with HT
Dual Intel® 82574L GbE LAN

i would say throughput wise yes , of course you would need a second ethernet port in it to then feel a switch and onto the access points

I does come with 2 GBe Nics...I may just give it a whirl.

Thanks

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

It's not just the CPU and NIC choice that determines if PFSense will route at gigabit....you have to select a motherboard that can sustain that across its bridge. Many consumer grade/desktop grade motherboards cannot.

 

[System Error Message]

even the very cheap consumer grade motherboards can. We're talking gigabit, not gigabyte. In terms of inner bus/RAM bandwidth (by doing routing over the CPU) a few GB/s can be achieved on a quad core bulldozer which is considered to be low end. Only the low powered or cut down or minimalistic SoCs may not keep up.

All that matters for pfsense is using a good NIC and decent architecture as some NICs actually handle part of the load rather than giving it to the CPU.

 

[Cloud200]

even the very cheap consumer grade motherboards can. We're talking gigabit, not gigabyte. In terms of inner bus/RAM bandwidth (by doing routing over the CPU) a few GB/s can be achieved on a quad core bulldozer which is considered to be low end. Only the low powered or cut down or minimalistic SoCs may not keep up.

All that matters for pfsense is using a good NIC and decent architecture as some NICs actually handle part of the load rather than giving it to the CPU.

Thats not always true.
Take an older PCI-E 1.0 based unit.
Take both NICs and connect them via a single 1x connection.
You are now sharing 250MB/s (roughly 2gigabit) for both NICs combined in both directions at the same time.
With overhead thats going to be less than 1000/1000

 

[System Error Message]

PCIe overhead is minimal, i tested it before.

 

[sfx2000]

Now the location where all the Cat5e converge and where I want the ATT RG (their router, which will be configured in bypass mod) installed, is not a very good location for Wireless propagation, so it will be a wired connection only router(WiFi disabled) and Router/Access point 2 will be the main WIFI AP with then R/A 3 will fill-in in the basement level.

The NID will be at the demarcation - normally by power panel/electric meter, etc...

Connectivity between the NID and the RG is ethernet, and if you're getting telephone/TV from ATT, you'll have to keep the RG as the primary router - you can place your own Router/AP in the RG's DMZ, and do everything you need to do...

Talk with your installer, and they can walk you thru it...

 

[Nullity]

The NID will be at the demarcation - normally by power panel/electric meter, etc...

Connectivity between the NID and the RG is ethernet, and if you're getting telephone/TV from ATT, you'll have to keep the RG as the primary router - you can place your own Router/AP in the RG's DMZ, and do everything you need to do...

Talk with your installer, and they can walk you thru it...

There is no way to use the ATT device as a modem/bridge?

 

[sfx2000]

There is no way to use the ATT device as a modem/bridge?

One can if just doing Broadband...

But if it's ATT UVerse with the triple play (Voice/Video/Internet), better off using their RG as the primary, and then leveraging the into DMZ... c

Comes down to QoS for VOIP/Video for their services, and then general high speed internet access after that...

The alt path would be to get ATT Broadband (vSDL-FTTN or FTTP), to handle that side, and then DirecTV DBS for video services, and either plain old copper for POTS, or move entirely over to Wireless there... that's the path I'm heading down - dropping the hardline and video from BigCableCo (FU and your $230USD/month bill) and keeping them onboard for broadband only...

Out here in San Diego - big battles between incumbent CableCo's (Cox/TimeWarner) and DirecTV/Dish right now, so some great deals to be had - and being in a Tier 1 market for Wireless (we have the Big4 ATT/VZ/Sprint/T-Mo), great competition there, and very good wireless 4G/LTE coverage on all the players...

 

[sfx2000]

So getting back on target with OP's post - yes, it can be done...

Just note that the RG has the horsepower to do the heavy WAN/LAN routing, and choose carefully what you deploy behind it to get the best performance... we're at a point with having Gigabit WAN speeds is overwhelming just about all consumer grade Router/AP's out there - most of the development there has been on the WiFi side as well as hosted services on the Router/AP... not on the Routing WAN/LAN side...

 

[System Error Message]

Just to let you know i transferred data a few years ago between a GPU and the main system. I had a GPU attached externally to my laptop and did a test. The laptop used PCIE x1 V1 so it has only 2.5Gb/s bandwidth total. I managed to get 300MB/s of data rate showing there is almost no overhead in using PCIe.

The only disadvantage of PCIe is additional latencies (still way faster than a 10G network though) and the more costly implementation. Every lane increases cost as it requires more space on the PCB and chip real estate. PCIe is actually a network so you can have a PCIe based network as data can transfer from 1 PCIe device to another without going through CPU. the PCIe chip is actually a switch.

Also gaming with an external GPU on a laptop is nice as it gives laptops the same capabilities as desktops. As long as you have a monitor attached to it than the PCIe x1 isnt a bottleneck but loading times for games do increase. Those that use nvidia optimus or such have it better because nvidia uses compression if the link is x1 giving an equivalent of an x4 link performance.

 

[Cloud200]

PCIe overhead is minimal, i tested it before.

PCI-E overhead in version 1.0 and 2.0 is ~20%

Just to let you know i transferred data a few years ago between a GPU and the main system. I had a GPU attached externally to my laptop and did a test. The laptop used PCIE x1 V1 so it has only 2.5Gb/s bandwidth total. I managed to get 300MB/s of data rate showing there is almost no overhead in using PCIe.

PCI-E v 1.0 is 2.5GT/s not 2.5Gb/s. This is at x16 lanes.
This ends up being a maximum of 250MB/s of theoretical bandwidth.

 

[System Error Message]

the maximum speed of a gigabit NIC is 128MB/s with about 120MB/s maximum throughput so im sure 1 lane is enough to handle 1 NIC.

Dont forget you can actually increase the PCIe clocks.