Why such lousy wired router performance?

[SteveRiley]

My ancient router and switch croaked today, time to upgrade. This is the gear that sits in my small first-floor closet: router connects to cable modem, 8-port switch connects to router and to Ethernet jacks throughout the house.

I'm mystified at WAN-to-LAN performance. How is that $100 wireless routers manage hundreds of megabits per second, but to get decent wired router performance I have to spend three or four times that much? Most wired routers seem to hover near the lower half of the performance charts. Since a wired router is doing less work than a wireless router, you'd think the opposite would be true.

So I'm wondering if someone might have a recommendation that's not on the list? All I need is basic NAT and SPI. No need for anything fancier like antivirus or antispam. I'd like WAN-to-LAN speed of at least 100mbps. I'd prefer all Ethernet ports to be 10/100/1000, but would settle for the WAN port to be 10/100. And I'd be happy if the price came in under $200.

One last thought...could it be that the wired routers end up with lower performance because of the additional traffic inspection they appear to do? If I disabled most of that, would the Cisco/Linksys and Netgear stuff perform better?

 

[thiggins]

It's a reflection of the market. Consumers primarily want wireless routers, so that's what vendors make.

Just get a wireless router and shut off wireless.

Disabling SPI won't significantly improve performance. Those wired-only routers are focused on SMBs and usually have VPN gateways, which designers reserve CPU cycles for.

 

[OldCoot]

Just get a wireless router and shut off wireless.

I'm in the same boat and don't use wireless. My 7 year old Netgear FVS 318 still performs like new, but the rest of my home network (cabling and nic cards) have been upgraded to gigabit capable, so I'm in the market for a new gigabit router. I do lot of large file transfers between desktops.

My question is: If I'm going to be turning the wireless aspect off, is it worth it to splurge on the Asus RT-N56U ($140), or will I get almost the same lan to lan wired transfers with a D-Link DIR-655 ($80)?

Thanks

 

[thiggins]

My question is: If I'm going to be turning the wireless aspect off, is it worth it to splurge on the Asus RT-N56U ($140), or will I get almost the same lan to lan wired transfers with a D-Link DIR-655 ($80)?

No. LAN performance is determined by the switch chip used in the router. All Gigabit switches run at wire-speed, with no intervention from the router CPU.

 

[OldCoot]

Thank you!!