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Asus AC86U Merlin vs Netgear R7800 OpenWRT

Carnagerover

Senior Member
Hi all,

I have a 70Mbps down connection and a 20Mbps up connection that is constantly getting saturated when it comes to the >30 devices connecting with a mixture of wired, wireless and smart devices. I tried Mesh systems but devices were too sticky and there was no QOS. I did like the parental controls however.

So I narrowed down my choice to either Asus AC86U running Merlin or the Netgear R7800 running OpenWRT, here are my pros and cons.

Asus AC86U Pros
Content filtering via Ai Protection
DNS based filtering via Cleanrouter if needed built in

Asus AC86U Cons
Range?
QOS - lists fq_codel in Merlin but heard contrasting information on whether it works, dynamic qos doesnt get great writeups. Is it possible to use fq_codel without having to use Dynamic qos? If you use traditional qos and fq_codel is that enough negate bufferbloat and saturation.

Netgear X4S Pros
Range?
Cake and then the piece of cake queue list to automate qos and elimate bufferbloat

Netgear X4S Cons
No parental controls in OpenWRT other than setting up a time based restriction as forward rule.

I think that overall I would prefer to get the Asus AC86U, although OpenWRT is a definate step up from the stock firmware on R7800 the AC86U is way easier to navigate and get information from. However my big concern is QOS and the OpenWRT QOS will just work whereas the AC86U may not, I know that you can use FreshJR adaptive QOS to try and get around some of the issues with the Trendmicro QOS.

Is there a way to set the AC86U to a QOS mode like Traditional QOS, input your Download and Upload and get it to use the fq_codel queue to elimate the issues with bufferbloat rather than the Trend Micro QOS?

Would love to hear people opinions on what I should do? Im torn on the way forward.
 
Is there a way to set the AC86U to a QOS mode like Traditional QOS, input your Download and Upload and get it to use the fq_codel queue to elimate the issues with bufferbloat rather than the Trend Micro QOS?

fq_codel is supported by Traditionnal QoS, however I don't know how well Traditionnal QoS itself is working. I did fix some major bugs in it a few months ago, but got next to no feedback about it since nearly everyone is using Adaptive QoS instead.

A recent speedtest I did using Adaptive QoS + fq_codel on my 120/20 cable connection:

42340126.png
 
fq_codel is supported by Traditionnal QoS, however I don't know how well Traditionnal QoS itself is working. I did fix some major bugs in it a few months ago, but got next to no feedback about it since nearly everyone is using Adaptive QoS instead.

A recent speedtest I did using Adaptive QoS + fq_codel on my 120/20 cable connection:

42340126.png

Thank you for the reply Merlin, do you use the default Trend Micro setup or FreshJR’s QOS adjustments? It seems by default there are a number of issues with the default Trend Micro classifications for certain things like gaming for example.

Does the AC86u fully support fq_codel as I’ve also seen conflicting information on that? At the hardware level? Or is it just Linux kernel stuff.

Thanks again
 
Thank you for the reply Merlin, do you use the default Trend Micro setup or FreshJR’s QOS adjustments? It seems by default there are a number of issues with the default Trend Micro classifications for certain things like gaming for example.

I just use Adaptive QoS + fq_codel without any modification. Works well enough for my personal needs, I am able to stream music and play online games without any issue even if I have a torrent suddenly becoming active during those activities. However everyone's needs are different.

Does the AC86u fully support fq_codel as I’ve also seen conflicting information on that? At the hardware level? Or is it just Linux kernel stuff.

It's a software thing. The missing portion of fq_codel support would require the network driver themselves to implement support for additional kernel features, and these missing features would only potentially affect people with full GBps links AFAIK.
 

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