What's new

Orbi RBR50/RBS50 Ethernet Performance

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

moecre

Occasional Visitor
Hi forum,

I'm using one RBR50 and four RBS40 around to house for wireless access points (AP mode only). Wireless is working great and I recently tried @Voxel's custom firmware on 1 satellite to fix stability issues, which it did indeed. Very good stuff!
Thanks to the custom firmware, ssh and iperf3 I was able to measure the throughput of the ethernet ports on the back of the satellite. I'm using these to connect to other unmanaged switches to connect my entertainment devices for example.
I was surprised that I only got around 250 Mbit/s instead of the gigabit Netgear advertises! I then tried one of the ethernet ports from the router and I got around 500 Mbit/s.
So my first question is, shouldn't this be a constant 1 gigabit or at least 950 Mbit/s on every ethernet port?
Is there some throttling on the ethernet ports on the Orbi's?

Hopefully somebody can explain this to me. Thanks a lot.
Pat
 
Need to know more about your iperf3 setup. What are you using for iperf3 server and client and what are your iperf3 settings?
 
iperf3 server on the satellite:

Code:
iperf3 -s -i 1 -f m

iperf3 client on my laptop connected via ethernet cable to various ports on the back of the satellite (it's the same for every port):

Code:
iperf3 -c [IP-ADDRESS] -P 1 -i 1 -f m -t 60 -T 1

This setup gives me gigabit on other routes for example office laptop through switch to homeserver, etc.

I'm I doing something wrong here?
 
First thing I'd do is plug server and client into ports on the Orbi router and get a baseline. Also try -P 4.
 
You should not need custom firmware or ssh to do this measurement. You should just be able to plug server into the router and client into a satellite port (or vice versa) and run the measurement.

You should also try -R to test opposite direction.
 
Sorry for not making myself clear: I don't want to measure the speed between two different devices connect to two separate ports on the orbi. I just want to measure from laptop to orbi. Because this basically presents the route from my "entertainment switch" to the Orbi Access point. Therefore I do the tests directly on the Orbi, which shouldn't matter right? Should be the same speed.
 
I don't want to test internet bandwidth/throughput. It's really just ethernet connection. 1 gigabit from one switch (and therefore all devices connected to it) to the Orbi access point.

The route from the access point to the router and main switch etc. is done via wifi backhaul then, so I'm not expecting gigabit here. And that's fine.
 
Could it be that the Ethernet ports on the Orbi's are somewhat "virtual" because from the config (config show) I could find something like that:

Code:
true_lanif=eth1

And the only "real" interface I see with ifconfig is eth1. The others are only ath which seem to be the WIFI backhaul.

Code:
eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 9C:C9:EB:27:4A:61
          inet6 addr: fe80::9ec9:ebff:fe27:4a61/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING ALLMULTI MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:58224077 errors:0 dropped:2180 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:140764070 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:584057185 (557.0 MiB)  TX bytes:2815410337 (2.6 GiB)

This might explain we it shares a gigabit over all four ports?!

The other thing, this satellite I'm talking about has a wireless backhaul to the others and the RBR50. And all the ethernet ports on the back are used to connect other devices or switches. Does it confuse the device which is connected to port 1 as a wired backhaul satellite/router or something?
 
Sorry for not making myself clear: I don't want to measure the speed between two different devices connect to two separate ports on the orbi. I just want to measure from laptop to orbi. Because this basically presents the route from my "entertainment switch" to the Orbi Access point. Therefore I do the tests directly on the Orbi, which shouldn't matter right? Should be the same speed.
I understand what you want to do. I'm suggesting you check the tool you are using to make the measurement first. iperf results depend on the performance of the client and server machines. By connecting both to the same switch, you would confirm the pair is capable of making a full gigabit measurement.

As far as I know all the Orbi router switch ports are equal, at least on stock firmware.
 

Latest threads

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top