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Breaking the Gb barrier?

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brimur

Occasional Visitor
Hi guys,

With the release of the 4x4 (1.7Gb/2.2Gb) ASUS PCE-AC88 desktop adapter I was wondering what the outcome would be to getting two of them and putting them in different PCs connected to the same router?

I currently have a TPLink C2600 capable of 4x4 1.7Gb streams + MU-MIMO. The downside to this, and many other wireless routers is that the Ethernet port leaving the router is a 1Gb port. So even though I might get 1.7Gb to the wireless router I only get 1Gb to the network.

But if I get two of the adapters above would I get 1.7Gbps between the two PCs or would the bandwidth be divided between them?
Example: I want to copy a file from PC1 to PC2, will the file copy at 1.7Gbps or 850Mbps since there are two PCs connected at 4x4?

One of these machines is a server and currently uses iSCSI multipath IO to my NAS via 3 x 1Gbe so I am getting 3Gbps there. I was thinking that if I also added a PCE-AC88 to that server I might get 1.7Gbps to the NAS via the server from my desktop?

Any thoughts?
 
1.7 Gbps is only the link rate. Your actual throughput will be quite lower than this, due to encryption and the nature of wireless technology.
 
Wifi practical rates are at best 60% if there is no interference and you have good signal. Its possible to get 90% link rate use but only by flooding and packet drops, not something that would work practically.

Wifi is only half duplex. Ethernet is full duplex so ethernet can give you 2Gb/s total while your 4x4 wifi gives you 1.7Gb/s total. There is 10Gb/s ethernet as well.

Connecting 2 PCs with 4x4 wifi at close proximity you will still not get the speeds and consistency of gigabit ethernet even if the link rate says 1.7Gb/s
 
Thanks for the replies guys. Just an FYI I currently have a TpLink T9E 3x3 PCIe card in my desktop, so a link speed of 1.3Gbps. When copying files from my NAS I average 105 - 110MBps which comes very close to the Gbe speed limit on the router (~115MBps). A 4x4 connection @ 1.7Gbps should, under the same conditions, get me up to 130 - 140MBps, well above what the 1Gbe port could support, hence my original question.
 
The problem is the architecture that many consumer routers have which is 1Gb/s from the LAN ports to CPU as it is switched. 99% of routers with a switch chip have only 1Gb/s link from switch to CPU so switch to wifi or the other way round can only go that fast.

From wifi to wifi instead of 1.7Gb/s you will get half of that (not shown on link rates) as wifi is half duplex. So no 4x4 wifi is still not faster than gigabit ethernet as gigabit ethernet theoratically has 2Gb/s for being full duplex

1Gb/s = 128MB/s
 
Thanks, guess I will save my money so. I must say seeing transfers peak at 110MBps over my current wifi is pretty satisfying. I was using a homeplug before the T9E that peaked at 35MBps which I thought was great at the time.
 
How about running 2 wires direct between the NAS and server? The cards should, assuming fairly modern, auto negotiate as crossovers and avoid the router overhead.

No?
 
How about running 2 wires direct between the NAS and server? The cards should, assuming fairly modern, auto negotiate as crossovers and avoid the router overhead.

No?
Depends on the cable itself. Usually they negotiate at 100Mb/s. There is straight through and Untwisted pairs, one of them will give gigabit.

If you could do LACP you will get faster speeds. You can also consider the AV2000 as depending on distance can give you gigabit throughput but you will still get performance around gigabit ethernet.

There is no overhead for the router when it comes to LAN. If it goes through the CPU than it is bridged and router CPUs can bridge at wirespeed without any issue. If you look at the speeds for mikrotik routerboards bridging without any rules is wirespeed so router CPU is not at fault here. Sometimes using a switch or router can be better but that really depends on the setup you have and how best you want to make use of it.

if you want faster throughput make sure there are multiple ethernet NICs and get a semi managed switch at least. You can use that for LACP to combine multiple ethernet ports for more bandwidth.
 
Unfortunately, unlike wireless, bonding ethernet ports does not aggregate throughput for a single stream. LACP would aggregate the bandwidth for multiple streams or users but a single connection, such as copying a file, would still be limited to 1Gb. I was trying to get around that by going through the server and using multipath IO + wireless but if going, desktop wifi->wireless router-> server wifi halved the transfer speed then there is no point
 
Unfortunately, unlike wireless, bonding ethernet ports does not aggregate throughput for a single stream. LACP would aggregate the bandwidth for multiple streams or users but a single connection, such as copying a file, would still be limited to 1Gb. I was trying to get around that by going through the server and using multipath IO + wireless but if going, desktop wifi->wireless router-> server wifi halved the transfer speed then there is no point
Thats the old way of thinking. LACP happens on layer 2, the OS sees it as a single interface. So if 2 hosts used LACP and transferred a file between them it would transfer faster. LACP has multiple modes and i have seen load balancing of a single stream of data before. The data is split into ethernet frames and each ethernet frame goes through a single link. This means that if you arent transferring 1500B files than you will be able to take advantage of it.
 
Thats the old way of thinking. LACP happens on layer 2, the OS sees it as a single interface. So if 2 hosts used LACP and transferred a file between them it would transfer faster. LACP has multiple modes and i have seen load balancing of a single stream of data before. The data is split into ethernet frames and each ethernet frame goes through a single link. This means that if you arent transferring 1500B files than you will be able to take advantage of it.

I dont believe this is true for single streams and typical home networks. Unless you are using iSCSI/NFS MPIO or SMB3 multi channel, a single stream will only use one interface regardless of LAG, LACP or any other aggregation function. I have a 2 port LACP trunk in my home network and it does not accelerate single stream connections.

For reference... http://www.hp.com/rnd/library/pdf/59692372.pdf
 
I dont believe this is true for single streams and typical home networks. Unless you are using iSCSI/NFS MPIO or SMB3 multi channel, a single stream will only use one interface regardless of LAG, LACP or any other aggregation function. I have a 2 port LACP trunk in my home network and it does not accelerate single stream connections.

For reference... http://www.hp.com/rnd/library/pdf/59692372.pdf
It really depends on the type of LACP used. If the OS sees only 1 interface but layer 2 sees 2 than a single stream will be sent over both interfaces handled by layer 2 (the NIC). There are many types of LACP - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation#Driver_modes
 
It really depends on the type of LACP used. If the OS sees only 1 interface but layer 2 sees 2 than a single stream will be sent over both interfaces handled by layer 2 (the NIC). There are many types of LACP - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation#Driver_modes

LAG is about capacity, not speed - basic limitation of LAG is that all packets within a stream still run on only one link - so whether one has 2, 4, or 20 ports LAG'ed up - any single stream still runs at wire speed - LAG just let's more streams run in parallel...

This is a low level limitation of Ethernet, which is below the layer where LAG comes into play...
 

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