Folks, I'm still having concerns over router throughput since I opted to purchase a 2820Vn to upgrade from the 2910Vn which was bottlenecking my 20Mb cable broadband connection. I haven't had time to chase this issue down properly despite trying some of the 'turn off QoS'/firewall/etc ideas but I thought it might be generally useful for people (and genuinely interesting for the techs) to see what sort of real-world throughput people were getting client machine connected by LAN not Wifi. This would help us spot any patterns of issues and boost feel-good factor on working setups.

Can I suggest, for standardisation, (though am open to better suggestions/technical improvements - have picked speedtest just because it's easy and pretty ) that people try at a quiet time to report (copy-paste below list)

* Draytek Router model:
* Firmware version:
* ISP name & advertised spec:
* Best output values from http://www.speedtest.net/
** server used:
** latency (ms):
** download speed:
** upload speed:
* client machine and browser rough-spec (e.g. ancient WinPC, shiny fresh Mac, souped up Linux box) - just enough to spot client related issue
* any other system / ADSL settings you feel are important (though I don't think we should require this of everyone because not everyone is equally geeky and those sorts of details can be asked later in specific issues.

Are people up for this?

Martin

There are too many variables to make it very useful I'm afraid:

modulation used
Length of line
age of line (copper vs aluminium)
Time of day
Air Pressure
Weather
local interference
proximity to a radio4/five live transmitter
...and the list goes on....

Whats the specific problem?

Actually, that's not true, is somewhat defeatist and your concerns are only for the ADSL element;

My aim was for everyone to collectively get a sense of what other people are achieving with throughput and therefore helping people think about what they can do to improve it (or not and live with it).

The problem I had before was that if I removed my Draytek router and provided a direct connection between my machine using the same cable modem to the outside world I got a dramatically greater throughput. This was with the 2910 (which topped out even after turning various internal firewall features off at around 8Mb instead of 17Mb direct on a notionally 20Mb cable connection). Looking into it I saw that Draytek acknowledged that there was a limitation on throughput (annoying that it wasn't advertised enough up front) which they had improved on a more modern router - which I assumed was a sign of more processing power for the SPI firewall element too, which encouraged me to fork out for a 2810 but where I still haven't had a significant improvement on the non-VPN connection. The difference is not a minor one, is not necessarily line related and is exactly the kind of thing which people might start to spot with real-world figures. As I said before, my router was bottlenecking my connection to an extent greater than I would expect (e.g. compared to the OpenBSD transparent bridging firewall - also doing packet inspection - I built 5 years ago from a pair of interface cards and a then not very fast PC) - is it too much to hope for a modern router to be able to keep throughput close to WAN-link speed? if so, how far away should we be hoping for?

I'm not sure people realise once they have a connection, a reliable router reporting a particular up/down speed to them on a config page, that there are then still real world throughput issues. If you convince people there are too many factors then you kill off any interest in trying to get some real-world figures to work with.

M.

mbartos wrote: Actually, that's not true, is somewhat defeatist and your concerns are only for the ADSL element;

Its realistic. I'm not going to argue. I'm not in this thread any longer.

Well, that's a very disappointing attitude, particularly given that you simply didn't pay any attention to my clarification that I wasn't so much concerned with the ADSL element which was the assumption which most of your concerns related to.

For the record, I just tried updating the firmware on my 2820Vn because subjectively the WAN network performance seemed to be getting worse and worse the longer it was up (uptime was certainly >1200hrs).. maybe a memory leak somewhere in it?, maybe just dodgy local ISP conditions? Anyway, I thought I'd live dangerously and upgrade the firmware to the 3.3.1.RC with USB... and have probably fried the firmware. I went through the web-upgrade but although it seemed to accept the upgrade and after I clicked the 'press this button to reboot' and exercised considerable patience, it's just been unhappy the whole time and not accepted any factory reset. So I disconnected my router and did some checking.. and lo and behold my ISP throughput to my machine more than doubled. This somewhat seems to imply that the 2820 still has the same throughput issues for plain NAT with SPI as the 2910 did.. what a disappointment.

Anyway, perhaps a simpler question would be to ask if anyone is getting >12Mbit throughput via ethernet to any type of network through any Draytek router to the outside world... if so with what settings and how does that compare to a direct connection?

M.

"ask if anyone is getting >12Mbit throughput via ethernet to any type of network "

YES, I actually get >12Mbit. My configuration is ADSL nil; WAN2 > VirginMedia Cable Modem; I do have a 50mbits account with Virgin and I do get 47Mbits throughput. I guess the reason I am not getting 50 is more down to the ISP.

I am running the 3.3.1.2 Firmware.