New router for Centurylink gigabit. Move from Netgear R7800 w/Kong to Velop or AC86u?

[baconcake]

Hello everyone that cares to read this. Quick (and hopefully not repeated) question.

I have a Netgear R7800 and moved to a residence with Centurylink gigabit internet last year. Internet worked great with stock firmware except for an annoying bug where enabling VLAN tagging isolated my wireless and wired networks. Netgear could not help so I installed Kong DD-WRT which allows things to work.

Two outstanding issues:
1. Download speed is lacking on Kong firmware. I have tested speed at neighbors and they get >900mbps with the Centurylink router in between.
2. Memory issue of some sort... I like to stream 4k movies to my Plex system and it works fine for a while before things start lagging. I notice high memory usage on R7800 and have to reboot to continue watching 4k. Standard res and lower bitrate seem to work fine.

I am considering either Linksys Velop dual band 2 pack or the Asus 86u w/Merlin firmware since both seem to work fine with VLAN tagging and PPoE enabled. I will not be using any advanced features at this time as I am starting to appreciate simplicity. They are roughly the same price.

Any recommendations? Both get good reviews, but they seem to have different audiences reviewing.

 

[avtella]

Go for the 86U if a single router is covering you well enough. For mesh Orbi is better than the Velop though. Also note that depending on your environment/distance you may find higher speeds with the 4 antenna single router than a dual antenna mesh unit also depending on client. Keep it simple if you can basically if possible with one router.

 

[baconcake]

Go for the 86U if a single router is covering you well enough. For mesh Orbi is better than the Velop though. Also note that depending on your environment/distance you may find higher speeds with the 4 antenna single router than a dual antenna mesh unit also depending on client. Keep it simple if you can basically if possible with one router.

I saw Orbi had a firmware update late last year fixing the VLAN tagging issues, but my friends riot experiences with Netgear made me steer clear. I’ll have to dig deeper.

Is running Merlin on ASUS as simple as stock on the mesh routers? It seems that mesh are the only systems that support vlan tagging and PPoE AND fully work on stock firmware.

 

[Philip Stevenson]

Hi,
There is a non released R7800 firmware patch to fix the wireless + wired isolation. I was having issues with accessing software via ports across wired & wireless connections when using a vlan. Though I do not have multiple vlans only the one for the isp. If you would like a copy of the firmware please message me and I will upload the file.

 

[Trip]

The reason why you're noticing DD-WRT having slow throughput on your R7800 is because most all third-party firmwares (besides Merlin on Asus, I believe) are inevitably going to break the binary blob that is Broadcom CTF (or equivalent from other chip OEMs), which will cause the unit to lose hardware-accelerated NAT, thus displaying the numbers you see...

The are number of solutions to this. The first is to see if you can find a stock firmware for the R7800 that is as bug-free as you need it to be (as hinted by Philip above). The second would be to switch to an all-in-one that has the features you desire and whose firmware is *confirmed* to work, whilst also not breaking acceleration/hwnat. That will keep your throughput numbers up at near line-rate. Otherwise, the last option would be to bypass the consumer all-in-ones altogether and step into big-boy land with the likes of an x86-based OpenWRT build. This will let you run whatever services than are of interest on the box, while still keeping routing throughput at or beyond 2Gb/s aggregate (required for 1Gb/s up + down connection).

I realize the last option is basically impractical for most average Joe's, so I would suggest taking Philip up on his offer, or replacing the R7800 outright with an all-in-one that works better for your use-case.

 

[Philip Stevenson]

Hi,
There is a non released R7800 firmware patch to fix the wireless + wired isolation. I was having issues with accessing software via ports across wired & wireless connections when using a vlan. Though I do not have multiple vlans only the one for the isp. If you would like a copy of the firmware please message me and I will upload the file.

Netgear has just release a new firmware version 1.0.2.52 which I have updated too and appears to work,