Home Router For High-Speed Connection? 376
soulprivate writes "My cable company has recently begun to offer Internet access plans with speeds over 30 Mbps (60, 80 and 100 Mbps). However my D-link router is unable to go beyond 30 Mbps if I use NAT; it reaches 60-70 Mbps only if NAT is disabled. Is there any recommendation for a brand/model of residential router that is able to get more than 70 Mbps with NAT enabled? I have been looking for benchmarks or comparisons, to no avail. Does anyone know one? What are your experiences at home?"
I would expect most brand-name ones would (Score:2, Interesting)
The reason I would expect most brand-name ones to is the public embarrassment if they were caught out like that.
Now everyone is going to check their routers and if the Belkins and Linksys-by-Cisco and others are all super-slow when NAT is on it's going to cause some major embarrassments for the industry.
I expect you either have an inferior manufacturing run, an inferior model, or an inferior brand.
hmm...wish i had that problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Second of all, shouldn't a gigabit router give you what you need? Or am I completely off-base here and missing something...?
Re:The best (Score:1, Interesting)
Have you actually run one that fast? And not just routing over your internal network, but routing over the Internet at 30+ Mbps.
Running across the NAT firewall at those speeds is difficult even on a fast server.. These little WRT's and such have the equivalent of 8-bit 200 Mhz CPU's.
As for the OP, what cable service do you have? I'm guessing not in the US? 100 Mbps might be common in Japan or something but in the US that's like holy shiat speed.
Linux firewall + gigabit switch (Score:4, Interesting)
You could do what I do: use a compact computer with two NICs (motherboard NIC plus a PCI 3Com NIC) as the firewall. Run Devil-Linux [devil-linux.org] from a read-only device. Then, the inside of your firewall can be a gigabit switch. Devil-Linux is pretty easy to configure, although perhaps not quite as easy as a consumer firewall/router with a good web-based GUI. You can boot Devil-Linux from a CD drive, with a write-protected floppy holding your settings; you can roll a custom CD with the settings burned onto it; or you can use a write-protected USB flash drive for everything. No hard drive is needed.
Pro: Fastest possible throughput and lowest latency; excellent security.
Con: Will consume more electricity at idle than a consumer firewall/router box.
steveha
Re:I would expect most brand-name ones would (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks for the advice! Too bad it's incorrect and you apparently just wrote something to see your name here. There's no reason for the brand-name ones or any one (they all buy and rebrand from the same Chinese OEM developers anyway) to maintain speeds faster than the fastest broadband connections on the market. This has been cheap and easy so far, since the market in this case suck at delivering fast speeds.
It's common knowledge among those of us that have 100/100 at home that those routers just can't keep up. They usually also lack RAM to track enough connections to saturate the bandwidth with torrent downloads or similar.
I'd set up openwrt or distro-of-your-choice (m0n0wall was nice last time I looked at these things) on a small and silent PC with two network cards, mini-itx or such. That would give you the prestanda and flexibility you want.
Re:I agree with TheRealMindChild (Score:4, Interesting)
The challenge is keeping your "old server" hardware alive without having staff supporting/monitoring it.
Sure, good HW can keep churning for quite some time, but sooner or later the HD will die. Or the PSU will grow tired. Maybe a fan will die and leave the system overheated? When compared to a brand spanking new dedicated unit I believe one can get away with less human monitoring. Of course, as always, YMMV.
Then again, should you have the resources available, pfsense or m0n0wall are the bomb. Seriously.
Re:Chart (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why do you need it? (Score:4, Interesting)
What website do you expect to give you more than a 30Mbps connection?!
Website(s) plural. The neat thing about the net is you can have mulitple connections going, which is extra neat if you have more than one computer. Me personally, I'd use that to sync with the server at work so I have a bunch of stuff at home to access. Fun stuff.
Frankly, though, I'm not sure why you're asking. "You're paying for a really fast connection, but couldn't you just settle for half of it?" How would you respond to somebody suggesting you disable one of your cores?
Re:Why do you need it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or you could be in a bad part of the 'net as far as Akamai or whatever distribution network you're using. When I download an ISO from MSDN, they're able to max out my connection, and I'm not on one of the "lite" connections.
Downloading from Windows Update, on the other hand, tends to run a lot slower. But that's because it's using BITS to transfer, even when it's in the foreground. Downloads from the developper's network, or direct download of manual patch files is unthrottled.
Re:Linksys Wireless WRT310N (Score:3, Interesting)
+1 for pfSense (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The best (Score:5, Interesting)
Looking for an alternative that's quiet, low power and linux friendly I came across the Routerstation Pro http://www.ubnt.com/products/rspro.php [ubnt.com]. It runs the same linux-based firmwares as the WRT line of routers, but with a CPU clocked more than 3 times as high, more RAM and expansion possibilities etc. I have not tested it yet though, but reviews seems promising, routing 100 Mpbs should not be a problem.
Re:Power usage (Score:4, Interesting)
doesn't make sense anymore - those projects all took advantage of spare clockcycles which were being provided anyway, and not being used. Modern CPUs throttle themselves right down if they're not loaded, and running a project like that just makes them run at full power when they don't need to. I was running rosetta@home 24/7 on my Q6600, until I realised that it was thrashing my system's cooling so hard that it was making ~ 3x more noise than it needed to be. Luckily I shut it off before I did any mechanical damage to the fans and my system is whisper-quiet again.
Anyway, to bring this back on topic. OP could try rolling his own [soekris.com]. (Note: I haven't done this, I don't know whether it would work, and those look frightfully expensive. It just looks like it would be a neat toy, and a geeky talking point)
Ip COP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I would expect most brand-name ones would (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually the conntrack problem on many linux routers isn't a lack of RAM - the tables get full because the default timeout on connections is something like 3 days, when it should have been something like 3 minutes. This is fairly easy to fix with a hacked firmware.
Re:The best (Score:1, Interesting)
I have had a lot of success both at home and at work (1000 users) running astaro over on intel. I use a 4 core box loaded with vmware esxi (free) so I also use it for a webserver, fileserver, and windows apps. Astaro is free for home use (up to 50 users I think) and has about every feature you could ask for (DNS, DHCP, intrusion protection, content filtering for the kids, email spam filtering, IM control, malware, AV scanning, etc). Take a look.
Re:Linux PC (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet another interesting alternative is to run your router on a VM. In my case, I also needed to have a file server, an Asterisk server, a web server, virtual desktop, etc, it made sense for me to also run the router on a VM. I built an i7 box with 12GB of RAM and 2x1TB disks for about 900 bucks, installed the free ESXi 4U1 and separate NIC cards for each interface and a virtual DMZ. The box is a rocket, and I now that covers all my needs with a single computer in the house.
Re:The best (Score:3, Interesting)
Hardware costs are pretty much free for a PC that can serve as a router. Just yesterday I pulled a Compaq Presario with an Athlon XP 1900+ and 1GB of ram out of the trash. Works fine, minus no harddisk, but draws over 100W at idle so probably not a good router candidate.
I have an old P3-600E running as a router. I picked this particular one out of the scrap pile because the 2nd generation slotted P3's are pretty low power processors (all under 20W). I have it turn off the HDD when not needed, which is most of the time. It draws about 30W with the 2 dual NIC Intel ethernet cards I put in it. which is not bad. I figure it's costing me about $20 a year to run in electricity, well worth it for the flexibility it gives me.
almost all routers sold in Korea (Score:2, Interesting)