10mbit fiber to home; NAT router can't fill pipe

Well, the pioneers are the folks with the arrows in them. Thanks for taking one for the team. :-)

If you can, I'd wait for the market to sort this out. If the problem is real you'll see upgraded products, soon. Look at the SMC webside for software upgrades for your router.

I don't know where it maxes out but a Linksys WRT54G has no trouble handing

10+ Mb/sec.

True, I realize this is pioneer territory. I'm sure these problems are real. I have the latest firmware. The issue is partly that few people have more than 1.5/128 DSL. OK maybe they have 4.0/384 comcast cable. Since this SMC caps out at 4 or 5 megabits, they won't notice the problem.

A $50 consumer NAT router may not solve the problem. Maybe a $150 MiMo router will. Maybe 802.11n will. I'm not sure when we'll see consumer combo NAT routers offer wire-speed as a feature...

If I don't want to wait (the pioneers didn't stop at the Mississippi and wait for the indians to go away) there are certainly commercial routers with NAT capability out there. (Probably these dont' bundle in

802.11 though, I may have to hang that off the side.) But which one? Any other pioneers out there in Scandanavia or Korea where they offer manly internet connections can tell me what you use?

- I hope there will dawn a day where we all have the "problem" of 10,

20 or 100mbit fiber to the home for a reasonable price.

- The p2p machine is on all the time, running XP, I guess I could try to dual home it and/or use Windows internet connection sharing, but I don't feel right about this.

- I actually think the SMC 2804WBRP-G can do 10mbit in some scenarios, I mean in theory the wireless G can come in at 54mbits, and I've had fairly quick transfers LAN to LAN on my, um, LAN, but maybe eMule is using a lot of ports or something (only 100 uploaders though), even though the machine is in the DMZ, and the SMC surely craps out around

4-6mbits, it even reboots itself once or twice a day.

Frankly, I may want to upgrade to 20 or 100 mbit fiber ($300/month) and I need to get a recommendation on an industrial strength router rather than any mass-market toys, or to hear from someone who is actually pumping 10 or 20 mbits up p2p through a more serious router.

Remember that traffic between the WAN and the LAN side is being handled at Layer 3 by a CPU running software, but all traffic between ports on the LAN side is being handled at layer 2 entirely by purpose-made hardware. The ports can handle the traffic, the problem is that the CPU is not fast enough to run filters on the required volume.

I should have mention that the Linksys replaced a Netgear that was bottlenecked at 5. If you want a NAT router/firewall that will with certainty route and not just switch 100 Mb/sec you're looking at a Cisco

7200--that's the lowest model in their range that they claim to be capable of wire-speed at OC3 rates for all services. A 3825 might do depending on what exactly you're doing.

A 7200 is chassis based, you can't just "buy one on ebay", you have to buy one with the specific cards that you need, so used may be an exercise in futility. I'm seeing prices going around $US6K for used hardware FWIW.

Personally my advice if you really want 100 Mb/sec routing would be to put together a fairly powerful PC and run Linux on it stripped down to a bare-bones firewall/router configuration--you'll want a lot of CPU power but it won't need a ton of RAM or much disk and PCI can handle a couple of

100 Mb/sec NICs at full speed without any trouble if that is _all_ that it is doing, which should be the case for a machine being run as a standalone router. If you're not up to speed on Linux you'll have to learn quite a bit before you have it doing everything that you want it to do, but if you're not up to speed on Cisco IOS you'll have the same problem.

Maybe I can go into the registry and enable this XP box as a router. It would connect directly to the FTTH, and route to the second NIC, which would go to the SMC NAT router, into which the rest of the computers and wireless connect.

A solution that I think would not work would be XP's Internet Connection Sharing. Apparently you cannot disable its DHCP. I'd like the rest of the computers to be assigned static IPs in the 192.168 range. Can the SMC NAT router can act as a client for ICS? Dunno.

Another solution is this latest Netgear MIMO router, according to a review at tomsnetworking it is built for speed, not just the wireless, but the LAN and WAN too.

I am pondering on this. Aren't there any purpose-made chips that handle the WAN-LAN level 3? I'm starting to fear that the even a $150 3rd generation netgear 240 MIMO box may not do what I ask of it. They may simply have a CPU coded to do the level 3, and again lack peformance. I guess even if a machine is in the DMZ it still needs the CPU to keep track of and route its traffic.

Looks like I have to assess my needs and what I actually require my network to do. The fact is, its just the one server machine that puts all the load on the FTTH. The other machines just web surf and do LAN-LAN traffic. Maybe the simplest solution is to activate routing in the XP registry on that box, and wire the second NIC out the back end to the SMC NAT box and then out from there connect the other machines and wireless clients.

Another solution could be to ask my FTTH ISP for a second static IP, then I could use a cheap hub and its powerful chips.

Are the Cisco knock-offs viable? Maybe I could live with mere T-3 wire speed and not 155mbit OC3.

Huh?

What's your business problem? Are you trying to fill a tens-of-mbits pipe with a $100 consumer grade router?

A decent PC with a couple ethernet cards configured as a Linux router will do that.

My business problem is, here in Taipei they have 10mbit FTTH pipes for $43/mo and 20mbit for $75/mo. If I just stick one PC on the pipe everyone is happy. Expept for the other 4 computers here. If I use my $50 consumer grade router, surprise surprise, it can only fill about

5mbits up the WAN. Maybe other FTTH users in scandanavia, or Seoul, or a few square blocks of Palo Alto can tell us how they handle it. Are you of the opinion that a $150 pre-n consumer grade router like this netgear 240 won't help? Is the only solution a $6000 Cisco, or learning linux? I guess if the rest of the planet ever gets FTTH they will go through what I am. Perhaps they will search usenet and find the answers we are scribbling here. I think the linux solution is reasonable overall, though many people will find it to be too much. Maybe in 10 years when FTTH gets deployed in the USA, 802.11n will be out and maybe have beefier hardware.

My remaining questions: linux can do it... can XP? Any quad ethernet cards you recommend?

it seems to be getting more common - we are about to get a 2 to 10 Mbps Ethernet upgrade on cable modem (UK, NTL) - but i will have to swap out the set top box as it tops out at around 5 Mbps.

anyway "real" commercial routers (or at least the cisco variety):

Cisco 1801W - 100 Mbps, 8 port built in switch, 802.11g, 802.11a - but at around $1500 list......

Miercom did a test for cisco and showed over 50 Mbps thruput with various services turned on such as NAT,firewall etc (with a varient -1812W) (if the link doesnt work, goto miercom.com, reports, and search on cisco)

the 851 / 871 are a fair bit cheaper - but still no where near consumer pricing ($600 and up list):

Interesting.

Do you have upling/downlink speedtests like this near you?

What's with the "pre-n" stuff? You're PCs *are* on copper, are they not? If you are unhappy with the WiFi throughput it's a WiFi problem, not an ethernet or "layer 3 routing" problem.

I'm suspicious of all pre-standard or proprietary wireless stuff. The mature stuff is bad enough.

(snip, someone wrote)

Note that the WRT54G has a 100baseTX WAN port. As I was reading this I was running ftp through a WRT54G from an 802.11B host, which made

660k bytes/s (to a pentium 200 box, to an NFS mount on an NT machine). Most likely 802.11B is the limitation on that link.

Right now I have no faster machines on the LAN side of the WRT54G, so I can't tell how fast it can really go. I would recommend the WRT54G, even if you don't need the wireless part.

-- glen

Since my previous post I tried a 100baseTX connection to a WRT54G, which is connected through 100baseTX to my house LAN. I did an ftp at 2340 kbytes/s, or almost 19 megabits/second, somewhat faster than a 10Mb/s fiber. I haven't tested it with a large number of connections, so I can't tell you how it does in that case.

It does seem, though, that a consumer priced NAT router can do much more than 10Mb/s.

-- glen

There are 2 laptops floating around here that would like to use wireless. But I'm only considering the pre-n because the salesman and the marketing guy told me they were faster in the non-wireless aspect too. Seriously though, here is a review

"Using the Throughput.scr with TCP and file size set to 1,000,000 Bytes from the default 100,000, I was able to measure about 94Mbps in both LAN to WAN and WAN to LAN directions for routing throughput. This is about as close to 100Mbps wire-speed as I can measure, given the limitations of Windows XP's TCP/IP stack." So I would consider that Netgear 240 pre-n box actually for its non-wireless prowess. Cautious anyway... not suspicious...

The speakeasy test to the USA is not giving me good results. I will look for a local test. With multiple clients, I've seen them suck a sustained 10mbits up out of my server, when its connected directly into the FTTH plug.

I'm going to try using the two NICs on this XP box and enabling routing as described at

... I will hang the old SMC WAP off the back end and then keep all the computers using it for wired and wireless surfing and LAN-LAN transfer.

Will post results.

Wireless is a shared bandwidth half duplex medium. In other owrds, for streaming users, the second user cuts everyone's speed in half and so forth. It can actually be worse than that.

IMO the speed numbers on the box are optimistic, even for one user.

Non-standard gear sucks more.

Do your ISP speed measurements from copper-connected PCs. Once you understand what that can do for you, then play with WiFI speed.

glen herrmannsfeldt wrote in part:

You can use `ttcp` (and TTCPW.EXE for MS-Windows) to test links independantly of disk. Most any machine should be able to saturate 100.

I'm interested in your results _through_ the WRT54G, ie sender on the LAN, receiver on the WAN or vice versa. Of course any two machines on the LAN will run wirespeed because the switch chip bypasses the relatively slow firewall/router ARM CPU.

-- Robert

When in Finland I am happy with my little cablemodem 4M/512 service. However, in order to give you another data-point I just checked my ISP's ADSL page. They offer 8/1, 12/1 and 24/1. For hardware they support the ZyXEL 660 and the A-Link RoadRunner 44. Hope that helps.

cheers,

Henry

Didn't work: simply enabling routing on XP. When I use the WAN port on the SMC, it won't let the WAN segment cover the LAN segment. So I tried just plugging the server into the LAN switch part of the SMC. This failed because my LAN is non-routable 192.168...

Did work: Enabled ICS. Plugged 2nd NIC into WAN port on SMC 2804. Configured SMC for DHCP. Only the link between the ICS and the SMC is DHCP; the rest of my network stayed intact on 192.168.1 subnet. Only trick is: access the server at 192.168.0.1 now.

Should work: Kerio WinRoute. In theory MS supports straight NAT, but I think it requires XP Server.

Robert Redelmeier wrote: (snip regarding the WRT54G)

The WAN port of the WRT54G is on a local 100baseT net with the other wired hosts.

After that post I did put a 100baseT host on the LAN side of the WRT54G and got 2340k bytes/second through ftp. The destination is a Pentium 200, with about a 10 year old disk.

-- glen