I am so stumped... Arris TG862 outperforms any other router??

[turboclag]

Hello all, long time lurker, first time poster. I have been racking my brain for weeks trying to help my friend with an issue he is having, and am seeking any and all advice in the matter.

He has Comcast 50mbit xfinity service using an Arris TG862 provided by the ISP. This of course is usually a horrible idea and one would be looking to have comcast put that thing in bridge mode and get yourself a real router immediately. Especially since the Arris firmware at this point in time is full of bugs and won't even let you do things like change your DNS.

So I recommended an Asus RT-N10+. It's a cheap entry level N router that is capable of running DD-WRT and since he only has a few users in a small apartment I figured it would be more than adequate.

Now one thing to keep in mind he has nothing wired in his setup, everything is wireless, and with the Arris, which only runs on the 2.4 ghz band, he was maxing out his 50 mbit allotted bandwidth, which surprised me because the 2.4 GHz band at my house I can rarely beat out 30 mbit, and that's with an Asus RT-AC66R.

Anyways he got the Asus, got DD-WRT flashed, set to N only, and set to a channel no one around was on, and can only best low 20's mbit. So of course he is not happy and we are wondering why the supposid POS Arris is besting this thing. At first I thought maybe the Arris was running 5GHz, but that doesn't seem to be the case, plus the adapter in his desktop isn't even 5GHz capable.

So we both pulled our hair out trying to figure out why the performance difference. We decided maybe because the Arris had mimo antennas, so we decided to try the Belkin Share N300. Yes I know it's Belkin but since it's DD-WRT and Tomato Capable, has mimo antennas, and great reviews with such a configuration, we thought it would be worth a try.

And as you can probably guess after receiving the Belkin, getting Tomato set up on it, we have hit the same problem, only this time the DNS keeps failing to resolve as well. He is totally unhappy and just wants to return both, put the Arris back in gateway mode, and wait until Comcast releases better firmware for it.

I have always despised Arris and these ISP provided gateways, and it seems I am being outsmarted by one. I have tried googling to no avail and am losing my mind over this. I am hoping anyone here might have some insight on this.

Thanks for reading!

 

[Fraoch]

Now one thing to keep in mind he has nothing wired in his setup, everything is wireless, and with the Arris, which only runs on the 2.4 ghz band, he was maxing out his 50 mbit allotted bandwidth, which surprised me because the 2.4 GHz band at my house I can rarely beat out 30 mbit, and that's with an Asus RT-AC66R.

You may want to bring over your own router and test. Just save your config first so you can quickly switch back to your settings when you're done testing.

If this Arris beats the ASUS RT-AC66 then Tim ought to put it in the charts! 50 Mbps over wireless is quite impressive for 2.4 GHz n actually, it would be ranked 11th on that chart...

I highly doubt this is the case, as do you, but if the ASUS can't beat it...that's that. There are a lot of references of slower speeds behind a router rather than directly connected to a modem but since this modem can't be put into bridge mode without a call to the ISP there's no way to test it.

How are you doing these speed tests? speedtest.net?

 

[turboclag]

Thanks for the link to the charts, that is..really interesting. Considering I get no where near that with my AC66U..but anyways, he uses comcast's speedtest and also speedtest.net, seems he falls in line with other similar routers. So now I want to know how the hell an Arris pulls out that sort of speed.

 

[Fraoch]

Thanks for the link to the charts, that is..really interesting. Considering I get no where near that with my AC66U

Tim uses a high-end program called IxChariot and different locations, then averages them. The intention is to provide real-world usage data.

Personally I've used a very simple program called iperf - it is quite conservative and will give "worst case scenario" numbers. With my ASUS RT-N66U the best numbers I've obtained are 96.9 Mbps (!) over 5 GHz and 46.6 Mbps over 2.4 GHz. This is to internal clients, not out over the Internet, of course.

Considering that this was from a Mac, which always tests faster for some reason, that the Mac is only 10 feet away from the router in the same room and that the N66U is one of the top 3 wireless routers in the 2.4 GHz band, that 50 Mbps for the Arris seems incredible and quite hard to understand. Your AC66 should perform as well or better than the N66.

However I believe that speedtest.net does measure what's being delivered locally to the computer that's running it, so if it's doing this over wireless, I can't see what's wrong with the test. Is it even faster wired?

As I indicated, sometimes you will get better throughput connected directly to a bridged modem/router/gateway and worse throughput through a router to a bridged modem/router/gateway. Perhaps this particular device is behaving this way, that in bridged mode, LAN performance to a connected router suffers.

Try wired performance to the Belkin or ASUS. If that's as slow as the wireless then the bridged Arris is definitely limiting LAN throughput.

 

[njweb]

To reply to your being surprised:

I am maxing out my internet connection easily over a wifi connection with my RT-AC66U, even on the far opposite of my house on another floor.
My ISP plan is 50 Mbps down but I usually get about 59 Mbps of bandwidth over my wired and wireless connections.

I can get close to maximum bandwidth over wireless (with a USB-AC53 adapter).
See the attachment in my post in the following thread for actual tresults.
http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showpost.php?p=67028&postcount=51

 

[jijo]

About IXChariot one time payment

Hi,

Can anyone answer me if you know it.

We have plans to buy IXchariot software(10 pairs). We would like to know whether this is a one time payment when we buy the software or is there any expiry date for it and we need to renew it after some period. We are not sure whether we need to renew it or not, if we want to renew please let me know how much time is the first payment allowed ?


THanks,
Jijo.

 

[stevech]

Chariot is the industry standard. But there are less costly alternatives. And you'll pay less recurring annual costs.

I've used and like
http://www.zti-telecom.com/

they have a generous free demo period too.