One thing Jeff didn't mention is that due to the high CPU and RAM in that ASUS router, you can be downloading several different torrents and the internet experience in general won't be degraded.
With my Verizon FIOS's router, if I try to torrent anything it gets throttled down to less than 10KB/s, and on my old Linksys, attempting to torrent would make browsing the internet nearly impossible.
Wait a minute. Is it the CPU and memory factor on the router that causes the "internet is slow, somebody close your torrents" nuisance? I always thought it was the bandwidth getting choked. Could someone expand on this topic?
Every TCP/UDP endpoint (such as a client or a server) maintains a state-table. As you might guess, it stores the state of each connection. You can view it using the 'netstat' command on Windows and Linux.
Bittorrent tends to create several entries in the state-table (since you're typically connected to hundred of seeds/leeches), which are each stored in memory, and uses up CPU resources to setup/maintain/teardown.
So if you were downloading a file via, say, Rapidshare, there'd be probably 1 TCP (you can configure your browser to use more) connection for your router to track, and do the necessary TCP handshakes, acknowledgments, RWIN scaling etc. Multiply all that's necessary for 1 TCP connection by N, where N is the number of peers you're connected to, and the limited resources on a $60 router get used up fast.
Early models of the now-famous Linksys WRT54G could reliably be crashed by torrenting while using stock firmware. A power-cycle was necessary to get it running again. Fun times.
However, all this only applies if you're running the router in NAT mode, which means the router takes the IP address from your ISP, and acts as the endpoint on behalf of your computer. If the router is running in bridged mode, then your computer acts as the endpoint, as much more equipped to handle large numbers of TCP connections.
> Early models of the now-famous Linksys WRT54G could
> reliably be crashed by torrenting while using stock
> firmware. A power-cycle was necessary to get it
> running again. Fun times.
I had an older Linksys model, but it would get into a state where the max bandwidth it would allow would be 32kB/s.
This is actually a two part problem. oz captured half of it (maintaining hundred of connections in the NAT state table). It can also be caused by saturating your upstream bandwidth, which causes your devices send buffer to fill. When that buffer is full you end up with your packets waiting in the buffer (which is normally fifo). What makes this very noticeable most of the time is the ack part of the tcp connection getting stuck, there by forcing the remote server to wait to send you the next packet.
There are ways to mitigate that kind of thing. the simplest being keeping upstream bandwidth levels limited to slightly less than your upstream connection speed. Traffic prioritization schemes also exist letting you have some say in the buffer order ( always putting acks, icmp, and ssh first in line for instance ).
You can also mitigate the NAT state table issue by limiting the amount of peers your torrent client connects too. Some clients allow you to set a global max, and others only allow a per-torrent max (e.g. rtorrent).
While that router may be beefy enough for multiple downloads. Installing an open-source firmwire degrades WAN performance a lot. I've tried a few different routers and dd-wrt / tomato generally reduces the WAN speed by 75 - 90% (from 500-1000mbit down to <100) in comparison with the default firmware. That is simply unacceptable, although understandable since this is probably not something that hits the devs very hard since most people are not on 1gbit pipes.
That sounds ... sensational. I've never used any of the open firmwares (so I don't have any deep motive) but I would really really hope that you provide this information to the developers. Preferably as a bug report with some kind of measurement data backing up your description, of course.
The router also hooks up into my TV, so not sure if possible in my situation. However, the FIOS router is exceedingly horrible - the wifi signal is very poor, and I almost never get the rated speeds using it.
What I've ended up doing is hooking up the ASUS router via LAN to the FIOS router and connecting all my devices to the ASUS. Every single complain is fixed going this route.
Yes, but it will require a call to Verizon to enable the CAT port on the fiber terminator box in your closet. You also need to set it up properly to keep Pay-Per-View and TV Guide working.
Yes, you certainly can. At my last place of employment, I built a custom BSD (packetfilter) based router using the nice multiport gigabit intel NICs. We had static IP configuration, which meant all I had to do was put the default_router and standard interface configuration into /etc/rc.conf and, as they say, voila, internets!
It can be done. I'm doing it now. It's not cheap, though, as the FiOS router is actually 3+ devices in one: a MoCA adapter for the uplink on channel C, a MoCA adapter providing networking to the cable boxes on one of the D channels, and a regular wireless router. In order to remove it without plugging into the RJ-45 port on your ONT, you'll need all three parts. Additionally, the ch. C uplink is encrypted, so you need to grab the encryption key from the router (available buried somewhere in the web interface). I picked up a Netgear MCAB1001 kit and it's working quite well.
Not if you have FiOS TV and want access to On Demand and similar features. The router connects up to the TV and not through a network cable. However, I've had no issues getting exactly the 50/20 speeds I signed up for with their router.
With my Verizon FIOS's router, if I try to torrent anything it gets throttled down to less than 10KB/s, and on my old Linksys, attempting to torrent would make browsing the internet nearly impossible.