Does a router with 1Gbit full duplex wan port exsist ?

[nicolaj82]

Hi.
I've often used this site when looking at routers, either for my self or for other people needing my help finding the right one for them.
But, i've noticed that even tho routers are advertised having a 1gbit wan port, none of them are full duplex. So i was just wondering if such a thing exist in a price range for us mere mortals.

 

[spinkham]

Not sure what makes you think that. All gig ethernet I've ever seen is full duplex, including every router I've used for years.

 

[abailey]

If your talking about wired Ethernet Gigabit, I believe it has to be full duplex according to the standard. So if the WAN port says Gigabit, it should be full duplex. Now wireless is a different animal all together. It is half duplex (except for some high price point to point wireless links).

 

[nicolaj82]

Not sure what makes you think that. All gig ethernet I've ever seen is full duplex, including every router I've used for years.

If that's the case, i'd love to hear which routers you've been using. Because as i can see on the site the fastest router atm has 1500 mbit simultaneous throughput on the wan port. And i do not consider that full duplex, that's only ~750 mbit down/up.

If your talking about wired Ethernet Gigabit, I believe it has to be full duplex according to the standard. So if the WAN port says Gigabit, it should be full duplex. Now wireless is a different animal all together. It is half duplex (except for some high price point to point wireless links).

Not talking about wireless, should have clarified i was talking about wan to lan. I do believe the ethernet ports can handle it, but i've yet to see a router being able to handle it on the wan port. Not sure if they advertise the wan port as 1gbit full duplex, i don't actually think they do as mentioned above the fastest router atm is ~1500mbit. And 1gbit full duplex means ~2gbit simultaneous throughput. I might be wrong tho.

 

[spinkham]

That would be full line rate routing over a full duplex connection. Edgerouter (lite, pro) will do that for common packet sizes.

 

[nicolaj82]

That would be full line rate routing over a full duplex connection. Edgerouter (lite, pro) will do that for common packet sizes.

That looks like a cool little box, but from i can tell from the snb review it's not a box for the commen foe. And the throughput test is not as high as i'd wanted.
Maybe in 2 years we'll see consumer routers get up there.
But thanks for the help.

 

[spinkham]

They have gotten much more home user friendly in recent firmware versions with setup wizards. The speed test is lower than what I see locally(and the Tolley tests), not sure why.

 

[azazel1024]

That looks like a cool little box, but from i can tell from the snb review it's not a box for the commen foe. And the throughput test is not as high as i'd wanted.
Maybe in 2 years we'll see consumer routers get up there.
But thanks for the help.

Not likely. Not many users have gigabit WAN, so the demand isn't there. You are talking about less than 1% of the market that could actually take advantage of that.

Having to ROUTE 2Gbps takes a LOT of processing power, even if you are using an ASIC or fixed function hardware. What you are looking for is something that enterprise and business users sometimes need...so you WILL find some enterprise/business routers that can do that.

For consumer routers, figure you are looking at 800-900Mbps one way, or maybe 1300-1600Mbps duplex absolute max, and that is just for basic NAT and WAN DHCP. Other things like PPPoE, etc are going to slow it down, let alone firewall rules, QoS, etc.

Its like asking for an economy car than can do 0-60mph in 4.5 seconds. Such a thing just doesn't exist, because that isn't the market. Now you CAN find a car that does 0-60mph in 4.5s, but you are going to pay for it and it is going to be in the sports car or luxury car market, not the economy car market (which is what consumer routers are).

 

[htismaqe]

Full-duplex simply means that an interface can transmit and receive at the same time. 1000bTX does not have a half-duplex mode.

What do you need 2000Mbps simultaneous throughput for, anyway?

 

[Cloud200]

We just got an edgerouter pro in the office to test.

I can do a regular SMB file transfer from eth0 to eth1 and from eth2 to eth3 at about 110-115MB/s (bytes not bits) in both directions.
some very basic firewall rules were set up (NAT masquerade, etc)

All ports were set to different subnets.

I am pretty sure that counts as full duplex gigabit on two different WANs to the LAN at the same time.

P.S. you can do even better with a desktop computer with 4 NIC ports (or 2 10GBE ports and some switching magic) and a firewall distro like pfsense.

 

[nicolaj82]

Not likely. Not many users have gigabit WAN, so the demand isn't there. You are talking about less than 1% of the market that could actually take advantage of that.

I do understand that, i was just hoping.

Full-duplex simply means that an interface can transmit and receive at the same time. 1000bTX does not have a half-duplex mode.

What do you need 2000Mbps simultaneous throughput for, anyway?

I have a connection that would require a router of that sort.

 

[azazel1024]

Then unfortunately if you want to be able to take 100% advantage of that, you'll need to buy at least low end enterprise gear.

I can certainly understand wanting to be able to use everything you are paying for...but I guess I [mostly] fail to see how a router than can do 800-900+Mbps half-duplex and maybe 1500Mbps full duplex is really that much of a handicap for a WAN connection.

I haven't delved the depths of the internet with a really big pipe before, but my 75/75 connection often times is edge network or server limited, not last mile connection limited. Granted I can hit a few sites where I can really max it out...but I'd think with a potential 800-900Mbps one way, almost all transfers are going to be limited to something other than your router.

 

[htismaqe]

I have a connection that would require a router of that sort.

As azazel has said, your connection will ALLOW it, but it doesn't REQUIRE it.

Certainly, I understand wanting to utilize every last bit of available bandwidth. However, it's really just not practical. Even with a router than can handle simultaneous gigabit TX/RX speeds, you're not probably going to be able to generate that kind of traffic from a home network.

I have customers who have hundreds of users utilizing gigabit ethernet Internet connections and don't come close to needing line rate, simultaneous TX/RX.

 

[azazel1024]

I think the hardest part here would be hitting both Rx and Tx limits. You'd have a hard time doing that with a home network unless

A) You are running servers from your house
B) Said servers have robust storage
C) You are running a serious bit torrent swarm in both directions, and said machine it is running from either has serious storage sub system and/or SSDs

Before I tore my 2x2TB RAID0 array from my server (sadly, just a 3TB drive for now, but soon to be 2x3TB), I would have hard time hitting both 1Gbps up and down at the same time. I could do 2Gbps in one direction (dual GbE NICs), but the mechanical drives would choke if trying to do much in the way of writes when pushing high bandwidth reads or vice versa. I think the most I managed to hit was around 1.2Gbps reads while doing around 200Mbps writes.

Even doing "crazy" amounts of streaming on a bunch of different devices, you are probably going to hit at most 80-100Mbps from video streaming (assuming you are doing something like 4 netflix streams in super HD). Maybe add another 30-40Mbps if you are doing a couple to several HD Skype calls. Maybe streaming a bunch of audio. Maybe, etc., etc.

Really it would just be torrenting, file uploads/downloads or running a server(s) that MIGHT be able to really hit those limits and the middile one requires the "perfect" set of circumstances to find anything that'll handle 1Gbps each way (or it can handle 1Gbps one way and something else can handle 1Gbps the other way).

Maybe in 3-5 years things will be a little different as 1Gbps internet becomes slightly more common (emphasis on slightly) and as both storage, memory, processing and business internet connections get faster, but even then, 1Gbps, let alone 1Gbps Rx and Tx at the same time is a stonking huge amount of bandwidth anywhere other than locally.

The difference between 700Mbps on a steam download and 1000Gbps, while also uploading 500Mbps to One Drive instead of 1000Mbps is a matter of minutes in most case (~1 minute in the download scenario for a 50GB game install, about 4 minutes in the One Drive scenario for a 30GB file(s)), unless you are transfering a TRUELY massive amount of data