In desperate need of a router that measures traffic by device

[Klutch14u]

Greetings. I currently have a Netgear R6700v2 router that I've very happy with. I have a ton of devices in my house, with a decent mix of wired and wireless. My 6700 does a fine job as it is but I've very frustrated with bumping up on my cable providers data cap each month. I desperately need to get a comparable router that will show me how much data each device is using. The 6700 shows me a total for whatever date range I specify but I need a more granular view. I've read a lot of conflicting info on various routers that supposedly offer this. Money isn't an issue, I just need it to have these features and as good of coverage as my 6700 has now. I do like the Netgear routers but am open to other makes. I'm not interested in 3rd party flashing, I've been down that road in years past.

 

[RMerlin]

Any Asus router with AIProtection and Traffic Analyzer would do.

Sent from my P027 using Tapatalk

 

[Klutch14u]

No shortage of people looking for this feature, some claim there are models out there but rarely say what it is. Finding it, in plain English, is another thing.

 

[RMerlin]

No shortage of people looking for this feature, some claim there are models out there but rarely say what it is. Finding it, in plain English, is another thing.

Asus RT-AC88U, RT-AC3100, RT-AC86, just to name a few. They will show you the top 5 clients, each of then broken down by protocol/applications:

If you want more details, you will have to look into a third party firmware, or an enterprise-class router. My firmware will give you complete historic data per client.

Note that this functionality is not available on the RT-AC86U or RT-AX88U.

 

[Klutch14u]

Asus RT-AC88U, RT-AC3100, RT-AC86, just to name a few. They will show you the top 5 clients, each of then broken down by protocol/applications:



If you want more details, you will have to look into a third party firmware, or an enterprise-class router.

Thanks. So can you only see the last 24hrs and the top 5? No other views?

 

[RMerlin]

Thanks. So can you only see the last 24hrs?

The stock firmware's Traffic Analyzer lets you pick up daily or weekly, with a few settings you can use to determine which period of time you want to use. I must admit however that Asus's UI is very unintuitive to use.

IPTraffic in my firmware is far simpler, where data is available either per day or per month, and you can select which devices to see, with both a starting and ending date.

 

[umarmung]

Asus RT-AC88U, RT-AC3100, RT-AC86, just to name a few. They will show you the top 5 clients, each of then broken down by protocol/applications:
...
Note that this functionality is not available on the RT-AC86U or RT-AX88U.

Which specific functionality is not available on the RT-AC86U, since you mention it earlier?

Is the cheapest Asus router with this total functionality the RT-AC66U_B1 ?

 

[RMerlin]

Which specific functionality is not available on the RT-AC86U, since you mention it earlier?

If using my firmware, then IPTraffic (a feature not available in the stock firmware) is not supported, as it's incompatible with the newer kernel used by the RT-AC86U.

The RT-AC66U_B1 remains the best price/performance choice. Stock firmware will give you Trend Micro's Traffic Analyzer, and my firmware will also give you IPTraffic.

 

[Klutch14u]

If using my firmware, then IPTraffic (a feature not available in the stock firmware) is not supported, as it's incompatible with the newer kernel used by the RT-AC86U.

The RT-AC66U_B1 remains the best price/performance choice. Stock firmware will give you Trend Micro's Traffic Analyzer, and my firmware will also give you IPTraffic.

Thanks RMerlin, about to pull the trigger on the AC66U_B1, seems I've seen people complain about the 2.4 band dropping on the AC1900 version of this, does the 1750 have that same problem? I might even look into the mesh piece of it for my upstairs but it too may have been buggy. It's been out so long and so many older reviews it's tough to weed through all the possibly old information about it.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Thanks RMerlin, about to pull the trigger on the AC66U_B1, seems I've seen people complain about the 2.4 band dropping on the AC1900 version of this, does the 1750 have that same problem? I might even look into the mesh piece of it for my upstairs but it too may have been buggy. It's been out so long and so many older reviews it's tough to weed through all the possibly old information about it.

I'm not aware of any widespread problems with the RT-AC66U_B1, although there will always be some people that have problems given the huge user base. Don't confuse the RT-AC66U_B1 with the RT-AC66U which is completely different and much older.

 

[RMerlin]

Thanks RMerlin, about to pull the trigger on the AC66U_B1, seems I've seen people complain about the 2.4 band dropping on the AC1900 version of this, does the 1750 have that same problem?

I'm not aware of any particular issue with that router and the 2.4 GHz band. I've sold and installed a few of these for various customers (most of the time because I needed a basic OpenVPN server for their office).

To be honest, if you look hard enough, you will see complains about wifi issue with every single router in existence... People simply do a poor job at troubleshooting issues, always blaming routers when most of the time the issue is the 10$ wifi adapter in their laptop, or their microwave oven causing interference (they emit EM radiations in the 2.4 GHz band).

What are you referring to as "the AC1900 version"? Asus has a number of different AC1900 class routers.

 

[Klutch14u]

The stock firmware's Traffic Analyzer lets you pick up daily or weekly, with a few settings you can use to determine which period of time you want to use. I must admit however that Asus's UI is very unintuitive to use.

IPTraffic in my firmware is far simpler, where data is available either per day or per month, and you can select which devices to see, with both a starting and ending date.

Thanks RMerlin, I bought/received the router, so far so good. I loaded your firmware and have about 24 hours on it so far. Question, I have numerous VM's and all show up in the network map as expected. One of them connects to a VPN and transmits a lot of data, for whatever reason it doesn't show up in the traffic analyzer. It only has one vNIC so even with using the VPN's firewall I'd expect the traffic on the MAC to be recorded. Any ideas?

 

[RMerlin]

Thanks RMerlin, I bought/received the router, so far so good. I loaded your firmware and have about 24 hours on it so far. Question, I have numerous VM's and all show up in the network map as expected. One of them connects to a VPN and transmits a lot of data, for whatever reason it doesn't show up in the traffic analyzer. It only has one vNIC so even with using the VPN's firewall I'd expect the traffic on the MAC to be recorded. Any ideas?

Is that VM using NAT or bridged networking? I recently used a VPN (running on my router) while transfering data in a VM, and it did get assigned to that VM's MAC here. I use VMWare Player with bridged networking.

 

[Klutch14u]

Is that VM using NAT or bridged networking? I recently used a VPN (running on my router) while transfering data in a VM, and it did get assigned to that VM's MAC here. I use VMWare Player with bridged networking.

The VM is running in a ESXi cluster. The VPN client runs on the guest but the guest only has a single NIC, I assume that'd be NAT?

 

[Klutch14u]

Is that VM using NAT or bridged networking? I recently used a VPN (running on my router) while transfering data in a VM, and it did get assigned to that VM's MAC here. I use VMWare Player with bridged networking.

Think I might have solved the problem. I disconnected the VPN and it's firewall, downloaded a small file to try and get the guest to register in the traffic analyzer (which it did). Since that time it's VPN'ed traffic is correctly getting allocated to the VM. Weird.

 

[Klutch14u]

RMerlin, how should I handle firmware when I'm notified that I have an update available in the interface? Do I ignore it and check for updates to yours?

 

[RMerlin]

RMerlin, how should I handle firmware when I'm notified that I have an update available in the interface? Do I ignore it and check for updates to yours?

The update checker checks with my own server, not Asus's.

You might wait before upgrading to 384.8 however, there are a few minor issues that are being worked on.