True or False: Expensive routers will improve your ISP speed

[azrael201]

I have been talking to people on a different forum about the Nighthawk and other AC1900 routers as to what practical use does it have for an average user.

People are anecdotally stating that with this router they increase their ISP speed. I can imagine this is possible if you were upgrading from the bundled router to a new router, but some are claiming going from an N600 router to an AC has improved their ISP speeds.

"To those that doubt you would need a router like this, I just replaced my Belkin Play HD (N600) running tomato with the TP-Link Archer C7 1750. On speedtest.net, my laptop (wireless) was only get < 20 mbps with the Belkin, but > 50 mbps (Comcast Blast) with the C7. So throughput of these AC routers are a lot better than the cheap routers even if you don't have AC clients/adapter"

Does this make any sense?

 

[stevech]

The answer, I think, in a practical sense, is "no", unless you use an old/slow router, or a badly designed one.

Only thing I can think of is if your router's performance, in IP packets per second, is too frequently less than your ISP can sustain on average. I'll estimate that most any $50 and up consumer router has a packets/sec capability for an ISP speed up to about 50Mbps (on the downlink). Others may chime in.

I have wondered though, if in some routers that have lots of options that require additional (beyond NAT) touching each packet, such as stateful packet inspection, QoS/MPLS, and so on, one could cause the packets/sec to decline sharply, for some optional config settings.

But for the average user, avoiding old gear or crummy gear, the Internet itself, its transport latency, and mostly, the hosts on the other end are the constraint. (Excluding WiFi's limitations).

I know from experience way back, that my old reliable Linksys WRT-54G router could not packet forward fast enough to get max score from Speedtest.net. But in real use on the Internet, it was good enough. I retired it anyway.

 

[jlake]

Most mainstream consumers don't know/understand the basic troubleshooting steps and don't have patience.....and just go buy a new router. Sometimes it's a case of "you get what you pay for" but most times, it's just plain user error. Although once you start getting ISP speeds above 50 Mbps, you usually need a decent wireless router.

The troubleshooting steps in link below will resolve probably 80-90 percent of wireless problems (and other problems).

http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=12453

 

[azrael201]

This is helpful thanks. I myself was going to go by the buyer guide and stay with an N600 and save money.

 

[L&LD]

I would say it depends on your environment and the size of the area you're covering.

With a (Linksys E????) router that was more than good enough for the 2.5/0.5 Mbps connection the ISP offered; an upgrade to an RT-AC66U (below any AC1900 class router, btw) offered real and tangible results for the 6 person office that upgraded.

While the total bandwidth didn't increase (of course), what everyone was used to experiencing (delays, pauses, etc.) with the old router seemed to disappear with the installation of the RT-AC66U.

You may save money by sticking with an N600 class router, but without testing in your specific setup you'll never know what performance you may be leaving on the table (which you're paying for).

 

[kitgorged]

False. You can make your cheap router to an expensive one by changing its firmware.

 

[AdvHomeServer]

'Expensive' is a bad criteria for assuming quality. Not all expensive routers are good (the Netgear AC1450 is reputed to have poor firmware.) A poor router may diminish overall throughput.

DD-WRT has had quality issues of late and some users on the broadcom forum report no throughput for some routers on some releases (me included on a Netgear WNDR3400V1 .. no 2.4GHZ at all for a router configured as a wireless access point). Hopefully this will be remedied soon.

Refurbished routers can be as good as their non-refurb counterparts, but are not expensive.

If your cable modem is not Docsis 3.0 and rated for higher speeds within the spec and if your speed is very high, it doesn't matter how fast your ISP is. You can't go any faster than your cable modem allows.

Some old routers came out long before 100mbs at home was possible. The switch might be 10/100 but I wouldn't expect to get 100mbs in. Reviews of some older commercial VPN routers commonly complain about the lack of throughput compared to input speeds.

I have an older Asus RT-N56U than is plenty fast, but is somewhat outdated by comparison to today's newer routers. It wan't expensive when I bought it and it costs less now.

 

[htismaqe]

This is helpful thanks. I myself was going to go by the buyer guide and stay with an N600 and save money.

How many clients do you have?

Not every situation is the same. An upgrade to AC1750 from N600 might not make a lick of difference for one client but it can make a world of difference if you have 10.

For me, the upgrade from N600 (WNDR3700v1) to AC1900 was a night and day difference because the WNDR3700v1 only supported 4096 simultaneous TCP connection while the majority of newer routers support 32K or more.

 

[htismaqe]

False. You can make your cheap router to an expensive one by changing its firmware.

This is certainly not always the case.

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
My answer is NO. Good performing router gives full speed you subscribed to your ISP. In my case my bundled package; cable, TV, Phone gives 50/3 speed. If I plug in good router it
gives 50/3 speed always, if I plug in other router this is not the case. No way any router
can exceed 50/3 speed. One example of slow router is Netgear R7500 for the time being. It only manages like
48.5/2.8 speed. If I plug in ASUS RT-AC87U or Linksys EA8350 both gives 50/3 speed.
IMO, OP's question is flawed. It should read constant full speed rather than faster speed. But speed handling
is one thing, there are other things we have to look at selecting a router.

 

[TonyH]

False. You can make your cheap router to an expensive one by changing its firmware.

Hi,
If router stock f/w has a room for improvement by stream lining. One analogy,
I saw a programmer writing a script using x bytes of memory vs. another one doing same with <x byte of memory.

 

[watusi]

Sure, it can make a difference, if you have a VERY high-speed connection.

Cox recently doubled speeds, and my service went from 50mbps/10mbps up down to 100mbps down/20mbps up. I was getting 80mbps, though, and I know that Cox always over-delivers.

First step was to upgrade my cable modem. I already had a DocCis 3.0 modem with 4 channels. I updated to the Arris/Motorola SB6183. That got me to 100mbps. It has 16 channels, and Cox has 12 channels activated on my system. (They do bandwidth-limit, but sometimes in the past when they have turned on extra channels they did not limit, I presume because they wanted to gain some real-world experience at higher speeds.)

Next, my aging DIR-825. I suspected some limitation, and, in any case, I wanted to improve my VPN performance, (5mbps). So, I went shopping for a router with faster CPU that will handle the next Cox upgrade.

I updated to an Asus AC97 and now I consistently get 120mbps down (and you can see it burst to 150mbps for the first few seconds, Cox calls this "speed boost"). So, slight gain, but pretty sure from this that the DIR-825 will have run out of steam by the next doubling of speed.

Dual-core ARM CPU at 1000mHz vs 600mHz single-core MIPS, + wireless offloaded to separate CPUs. 256MB RAM vs. 64MB. Fast USB3 storage (measured 500mbtye/sec read from a $30 128G memory stick.) I think the AC87 is pretty-much the fastest CPU of current integrated wireless routers. But I would expect very similar specs now in lower-cost routers.

(Sorry if this is off-topic for this area. I actually came here looking for ideas for a simple non-wireless router, as I'm not so happy with AsusWrt-merlin having come from OpenWrt on the DIR-825. It lacks the flexibility of OpenWrt, available pre-compiled packages are ANCIENT, no packages that plug-in GUI stuff to Luci, etc. I want that flexibility more for the interface to the Internet than I care about for wireless.)

 

[L&LD]

Next, my aging DIR-825. I suspected some limitation, and, in any case, I wanted to improve my VPN performance, (5mbps). So, I went shopping for a router with faster CPU that will handle the next Cox upgrade.

I updated to an Asus AC97 and now I consistently get 120mbps down (and you can see it burst to 150mbps for the first few seconds, Cox calls this "speed boost"). So, slight gain, but pretty sure from this that the DIR-825 will have run out of steam by the next doubling of speed.

Going from 5Mbps to 120Mbps is a slight gain?

 

[watusi]

Going from 5Mbps to 120Mbps is a slight gain?

No, LOL, you misunderstood my comments.

5mbps is my VPN performance on the DIR-825. I did an Ookla speedtest on 4G or good WiFi outside of my home, connecting through my VPN on the DIR-825 and so then out to the Internet via my cable modem connection.

The DIR-825 gets about 100mbit/sec with the new cable modem on gigabyte ethernet. The AC87 gets me to at least 150 mbit/sec, which is Cox's burst speed for my service.

Still, that is a 50% improvement, so you still have a point!

I have not measured VPN performance on the AC87 yet. I haven't set-up VPN. I'm not sure that I can, at least not the same way. I was using an IPSec VPN with StrongSwan on openWRT.

 

[TonyH]

Sure, it can make a difference, if you have a VERY high-speed connection.

Cox recently doubled speeds, and my service went from 50mbps/10mbps up down to 100mbps down/20mbps up. I was getting 80mbps, though, and I know that Cox always over-delivers

Hi,
Keyword here is over-delivers. Most ISPs are not that generous. I now and then
see download speed slightly going over 50.

 

[CooCooCaChoo]

* Forum seems to be double posting. *

 

[CooCooCaChoo]

You don't need the absolute top of the line router costing $300USD or more, regardless of what marketing materials you read telling you that you do.

A slow router will not be able to handle a fast connection, and a fast router will be over kill for a slow connection. However, a fast router would be future proof for if and when you decide to go faster.

Sure, it can make a difference, if you have a VERY high-speed connection.

Cox recently doubled speeds, and my service went from 50mbps/10mbps up down to 100mbps down/20mbps up. I was getting 80mbps, though, and I know that Cox always over-delivers

Hi,
Keyword here is over-delivers. Most ISPs are not that generous. I now and then
see download speed slightly going over 50.

When I signed up for Comcast, my speed was only 50/10, but I got 57/11 consistently. A few months ago, they doubled my speed for free (YEAH BUDDY!) to 105/10. I get 126/12 consistently. I know their CS is crap (they try to sell you stuff you don't want every time you call them for tech support), but their product is top notch.

 

[watusi]

I've finally had a chance to test my OpenVPN performance on the AC87 when on a good Internet connection outside of my home. I tested with a 2008 Aluminum Macbook (Core 2 Duo, pretty slow for today), and an iPad Air2. I forgot to test with my iPhone 5S.

I'm pretty impressed. Certainly better than my old DIR-825 (that was set up using IpSec, and never DID get it to work with the Macbook...)

MY connection: 100mbps/down, 10mbps up

REMOTE connection (friend's house): 30mbps/down, 5mbps/up (same cable system, different service tier)

(both tested with Speedtest, so real speeds to Internet)

OpenVPN got 8+ mbps down/5mbps up on both MacBook and iPad Air2. So, I was nearly able to get the full available bandwidth in both directions. (Given the asymmetrical limitation.)

So, I know that, so far, the AC87 is not a bottleneck. Would be interesting to see where it dies with a faster uplink.

 

[tipstir]

Since 2012, I am being using TP-LINK TL-ER6120 with is a wired manged business router. For WAN in this router can be optimized to top performance. NAT throughput is optimized also. So for your ISP download and upload speeds you can configured this router to max throughput on WAN.

Example: Comcast 105 DWL/ 20 UPL MBPS with this router 132 / 22
Comcast 50 DWL/ 10 UPL MBPS with this router 60 / 11

WAN
There upstream and downstream setting by KBPS
There is port speed and configuration settings for rated download and upload.

Most of all with firmware updates keeps trouble free operation 24/7 since 2012.

 

[System Error Message]

I'm using a mikrotik CCR1036-8G-2S+ as my main router which has 36 TILE cores at 1.2Ghz, 4GB ram (upgrade-able),microSD,USB, 1GB internal flash and an asus AC68U as my wireless AP. While the router costs a lot i find it is many many times cheaper than the price/performance of any consumer router while being capable of 41 million packets per second but throughput limited to port bandwidth. It has lower latency than consumer routers while being more feature packed but not for the faint hearted.

With the SFP+ ports i dont need a modem and is ready for multiple 10G internet. The router line i use is what some ISPs use to do their L3 routing or as an edge router. if anyone is skilled in networking they should give those enterprise/business routers a go. They dont really have to comply to the same rules or laws like the consumer router manufacturers have. mine has configurable firewall from L2 to L7 which is really fun in what you can do. No more brute force or DOS or hacks.

VPN and PPP/tunnel performance is also better than consumer routers too. The only alternative to this router is ubiquity but they cant match the performance, price and features.

So expansive routers do make your internet faster but only in the non-consumer line but also tend to be cheaper in price/performance