I am also trying to find adequate hardware for a home symmetrical gigabit connection, what I am finding is that none of the tests out there actually show the speed under real world or with PPPoE and WAN VLAN tagging, which many of the "fiber" carriers require. In my case I falsely assumed an Asus RT-AC68U would be better than my old RT-N56U...it wasn't. The RT-N56U (with 3rd party firmware) readily smokes the AC68U, the AC68U would be at 100% CPU saturation below gigabit unidirectional...where the RT56U is below 2% CPU load at gigabit unidirectional, and using synthetic tests (without PPPoE) I was able to get 1800Mbps bidirectional across it using iperf3 (one client and one server on each side of the firewall configured as it would for daily use other than PPPoE). I am returning my AC68U as it is way overpriced if I only use it as an AP, though it does have good signal propagation as an AP.
In my case the carrier "provided" (meaning they forced me to pay for this crap) is entirely inadequate. The "modem" they sold me is a Zyxel C1100Z, which is likely a perfectly adequate device for DSL but entirely inadequate for gigabit ethernet service. Lets not even get started at how horribly limited your configuration options are, or that it leaves some backdoor open to the carrier that could be compromised by a hacker later...it is just a bad piece of hardware to force a custom to buy for this level of service (thanks Century Link, really winning points there!). The WiFi is only 802.11n, how does that even remotely make sense as hardware to issue for a gigabit service contract? Even wired it doesn't seem capable of actually providing gigabit unidirectional, let alone symmetrically.
I have been looking at some of the new Mikrotik hardware, I am more than willing to fork over up to $500 for a quality router that actually can support me for many years into the future. The problem is back to the same thing, Mikrotik's benchmarks don't even include NAT functionality and they absolutely lack PPPoE tests...so it is on the user to find out if the PPPoE is all software based and single threaded or not based on their own testing. Being that Mikrotik claims to be carrier focused and offers PPPoE carrier side termination I would expect them to have more info on this published, but they don't.
Ubiquiti's routers look interesting as well, though they also lack any meaningful benchmark metrics...though at least they have an active community that has some real world testing to share.
I would go for pfSense if any hardware vendor had any performance benchmarks, and I realize I could do a DIY device built with older x86 hardware, however 24x7x365 power does add up and I am not going to run yet another 100W device continuously. How Netgate offers any hardware without metrics to go by is shocking, it isn't like they are all low cost items. I have a lovely Intel Skull Canyon NUC that could make a very capable (and rather expensive for the use case) firewall platform if it had more than 1 NIC, and using the USB NIC with pfSense has proven to result in kernel panics under any load. The N56U lacks any IPv6 firewall support in the firmware I have on it, and I'd rather not mess around with something that is underpowered just to get IPv6 firewall...so I am likely going to test my NUC with one of the open source firewall distributions and just accept that it also can't pass symmetrical gigabit as it only has a single NIC and will be passing all traffic over the single NIC using VLANs.
Some day I hope a benchmark exists that actually emulates the configuration that these higher bandwidth Internet services require, until then we are stuck with testing things ourselves and leveraging return policies from resellers or return protection from our credit cards.
