Best Router for Packet Priortization

[System Error Message]

I just have not seen that kind of slowness now days. Yes, 15 or 20 years ago when we were running 5 meg DSL. The DSL was a huge bottle neck in those days. And there were not any good priority systems back then. I tried the one in Smoothwall back then and it cut my internet speed down to 3 meg.

Yes RV340 router.

even 1 Gb/s needs QoS too. The difference between B and A+ on dslreports matter even if you're 1 guy just doing one thing. Good QoS lets you do interesting things. The hardware NICs dont properly support multi queue so before the packets get into the queue you can rearrange them so the latency important ones go first for example. Its easy to fully use a 1Gb/s internet as well even though people think its big. To me i think just how much faster my file server with 10Gb/s network would be on WAN.

So many things that people miss out when they get such fast internet. Even if you dont need it, practicing it now will let you have it ready when you need it.

 

[coxhaus]

I just don't see it with 1 gig internet for real. Nobody can keep 1 gig internet saturated at home or in a small business. It is just too much data.

 

[Trip]

That's what I was eluding to previously. It's tougher to notice across interfaces where link speed is identical or very close, and/or when utilization is low. In optimal-enough conditions (gigabit internet; well-controlled environments), one is lead to question the need for SQM outright. Here's an interesting reddit snippet where a network admin does largely that.

I think the real mistake here is being too locked into either viewpoint. "If all you have is a hammer, then every problem must be a nail."

Grammar edits

 

[coxhaus]

Believe it or not I can see it for wireless as wireless is not as fast or reliable as 1 gig internet plus wireless has lots of latency. With that being said faster hardware does solve problems. And I don't see hardware slowing down.

Back in the 5 meg DSL days it was considered the end all internet problem and we were not going to get anything faster. Yet hardware was much faster and getting faster. Boy did the Telco's learn a lesson. Cable came about. Fiber was not even thought of at this point.

So I am not sure I see everything as a nail. Boy we sure could of used cake back then. But then the question becomes if we had it would we be where we are today?

 

[MichaelCG]

I just don't see it with 1 gig internet for real. Nobody can keep 1 gig internet saturated at home or in a small business. It is just too much data.

For 99% of home users, I would agree. Rarely will you see 5-10 active wired users really need it on a 1Gbps connection. But you get 20-30 active users, you could easily start burying a 1Gbps connection. If you give your users bandwidth, they will find something to take it.

I am a tele-commuting employee....I can myself can easily account for 200-300Mbps of traffic for 20-30 minutes at a time as I move large files around. My general use is usually sub-5Mbps. You multiply my use case to 20 people moving large files around, very easy to peg out a 1Gbps connection. For those that want to say use your local file servers....well....we are a Google shop, Google Drive is our file server. We have 30k users on Google moving crap loads of data to/from it daily.

Do we use QoS at the gateways at work? Nope...mostly because the commercial firewalls we run do not support QoS. However the rest of the network runs QoS to prioritize all of the various media streams across the LAN and WAN. Our proxy servers also do some of this prioritization work for certain web flows.

 

[coxhaus]

If you work from home and everybody else works from home then it seems like it is more than 1 gig line involved.

I can remember when we had 56K lines pegged back in the real old days. We then moved to T1 lines and pegged those. I lived lots of saturated lines in my days. The whole 8 hours of work lots of our lines were pegged for years upon years. Cake would have helped but the lines would have still been saturated.

 

[LongRangeSkeet]

I own an XR500 router running the Netduma firmware and I personally wouldn't recommend it. It lacks too many necessary features and has way too many bugs. For instance, having IPv6 enabled on the router breaks their bufferbloat system and can sometimes lock up WAN entirely. Their GUI always reports wrong values and has glitches as well. Also, the firmware support is absolutely abysmal and so far we haven't gotten anything significant for well over a year. Just head on over to Netduma's forums and see for yourself all the owners complaining about their issues with the router and the company's lack of support.

And so, I too, once again, have set off on a quest to find the one router to rule them all. Sadly it seems that ALL consumer routers sold in stores have amazing hardware but really crap firmware to run it. Ubiquity Dream Machine and the Synology RT2600AC seem like they may have very good firmware running but I can't find any info anywhere about what types of QOS or SQM that they offer.

Recently I've even tried flashing OpenWrt on one of my routers in hopes of getting CAKE but immediately ran into stability issues right out of the box.

 

[Trip]

Believe it or not I can see it for wireless. [...] faster hardware does solve problems. And I don't see hardware slowing down. [...] So I am not sure I see everything as a nail. [...] sure could of used cake back then. But then the question becomes if we had it would we be where we are today?

All relevant points and I didn't mean to label you specifically, cox (edited my post). It's great that we have CAKE and I hope more devices work it in as an option, Cisco's RV distro included.

 

[Trip]

Ubiquity Dream Machine and the Synology RT2600AC seem like they may have very good firmware running but I can't find any info anywhere about what types of QOS or SQM that they offer.

UniFi gateways offer the same Smart Queue (fq_codel + HTB) as EdgeOS offers on EdgeRouters, albeit the GUI-based control is more dumbed down. Here's a YouTube vid that demonstrates where it is in the controller and how to set it. Nothing Synology makes has SQM of any sort. They use plain old pfifo_fast, like all other legacy distros riding on top of most consumer hardware and a good amount of small-biz hardware.

[...]tried flashing OpenWrt [...] in hopes of getting CAKE but immediately ran into stability issues

Which router was that?

 

[coxhaus]

Trip just remember cake is not a savior. Overloaded connections are overloaded connections. Back in the day when we ran overloaded lines for days months years, there was a lot of hardware that could not do it. We used Cisco PRO gear and they did a good job of keeping the connections running and not timing out. You need hardware that can run non-stop. No memory leaks etc.

 

[Trip]

For sure; I don't believe I advocated it as one. Modern qdiscs thrown at routinely over-saturated LANs, APs, low-quality hardware, etc. are the wrong solution, no doubt.

On the flip side, average Ookla results in the USA as of the end of 2018 were still only 96 Mb/s down, 33Mb/s up. Inaccuracy and sampling skew aside, let's say it's roughly close to now, even if that number has grown by 50% (which it probably hasn't). That's still a lot of users (in the millions), small businesses included, who, presuming they cannot just buy gigabit internet (80% of my 1+ million person market cannot) could likely stand to benefit (highly) from having SQM on the gateway. You can have all the over-provisioned L3 LAN and WLAN you want, but they alone will not alleviate gateway bloat that, I think you'd agree, has been demonstrated to exist well enough by dtaht, colleagues and many end users. And yes, those cases may be going away fast due to gig internet growing exponentially, but I'd say there will still be years before that, TCP/IP evolution and/or universal hardware enhancements render something like SQM completely moot.

 

[coxhaus]

I have a lot of country fiends in that boat. Their internet sucks. This is a big reason I would not live in the country. I feel sorry for all the farmers and ranchers out in the country that have to run their business out in the country with bad internet.

The country statistics may be skewing the stats. The people in the city have it a lot better than country folk when it comes to internet.

 

[Trip]

People in the country aren't skewing the sample; as U.S. citizens just as much as we are, they are the sample, along side us. Thus my point. Even those in most non-primary cities don't have it super great, either. I'm in a secondary market with a 1-million person metro area and the best we've got is a regional fiber ISP at 1000/100 to maybe 10-20% of the population (maybe), Spectrum 300/20 to roughly 70-80% (maybe), with the remainder still stuck on 6 Mb/s DSL, satellite or WISP. And our market may end up skewing above the national average... There's a ton of improvement left to go as a nation before just buying more pipe becomes the routine solution it's purported to be by those that are lucky enough to live in areas where that's the predominant norm.

 

[LongRangeSkeet]

UniFi gateways offer the same Smart Queue (fq_codel + HTB) as EdgeOS offers on EdgeRouters, albeit the GUI-based control is more dumbed down. Here's a YouTube vid that demonstrates where it is in the controller and how to set it. Nothing Synology makes has SQM of any sort. They use plain old pfifo_fast, like all other legacy distros riding on top of most consumer hardware and a good amount of small-biz hardware.Which router was that?

I tried OpenWrt on the Linksys EA6350 and it totally locked up on me within less than 24hrs, so I had to go back to stock firmware

 

[Trip]

I tried OpenWrt on the Linksys EA6350 and it totally locked up on me within less than 24hrs, so I had to go back to stock firmware

The EA6350 being Broadcom-based may likely have been your problem. OpenWRT typically works best and has been most developed for Qualcomm-based platforms; more dev hours on it for more overall stability, included deeper and more complete kernel-level integration, thanks in no part to Broadcom's insistence on anti open-source, proprietary binary blobs. I'd be willing to be if you slapped it on equivalent QCA hardware, the results would be much better.

 

[coxhaus]

My country fiends would be happy with 6 meg DSL. I have 4 couples out in the country right close by me that don't have it that good.

 

[Trip]

Ouch. Yeah some of the DSL infrastructure left around out there is pretty bad. I have one customer whose upstream DSL aggregation box is so routinely riddled with squirrels, chipmunks, etc. and/or whose line will seemingly go down at the slightest hint of wind or precipitation, that's it's almost pointless to even have the service to begin with...

 

[LongRangeSkeet]

The EA6350 being Broadcom-based may likely have been your problem. OpenWRT typically works best and has been most developed for Qualcomm-based platforms; more dev hours on it for more overall stability, included deeper and more complete kernel-level integration, thanks in no part to Broadcom's insistence on anti open-source, proprietary binary blobs. I'd be willing to be if you slapped it on equivalent QCA hardware, the results would be much better.

Hmmm. I didn't know that. However, I looked up the router's specs and it looks like a Qualcomm chip inside, at least according to this page https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/linksys/linksys_ea6350_v3

 

[coxhaus]

They have microwave and satellite. Microwave seems the best. Maybe 3 meg if it works.

And saddest thing is they pay more than I do for internet.

 

[RMerlin]

One potential idea for OpenWRT would be to get a low-power PC (like a Qotom), and run the x86 version of OpenWRT on it. You'd need an external AP for wifi.