Is anyone able to confirm if - like the WDR4300 - the WDR4900 has been or will be given the guest network functionality via a firmware update?

Presumably there's no reason why it couldn't be done, unless it would conflict with their model price segment differentiation.

TP Link are pretty helpful and responsive if you email them. They're based in China, though, so there is a time difference, and occasionally a bit of a language gap.

They promised to include better options for a higher PPPoE MTU and for turning STP off in the next update for the WDR4300 - although they did also say it wasn't a high priority improvement because they hadn't received much customer feedback on those issues.

Time will tell, I guess...

I followed rhetherington's instructions to get some numbers for the TL-WDR4300 with TP Link firmware v3.13.31 (there is a later version available).

Slightly different hardware. I had a Core i5 on the WAN side, but only an aging Pentium 4 on the LAN side, so it can probably do (a lot?) better in truth.

Here are the settings and results:



WAN Connection: PPPoE
MTU: 1492 (pppoe-server parameter -m 1452 as well as changing the router and LAN PC defaults)
Hardware NAT: On
SPI Firewall: Off
DOS/Flood Protection: Off
Statistics: Off

iPerf Throughput WAN-LAN: 662Mbps



WAN Connection: PPPoE
MTU: 1492 (pppoe-server parameter -m 1452 as well as changing the router and LAN PC defaults)
Hardware NAT: Off
Software NAT: On
SPI Firewall: On
DOS Protection: On but with only disable WAN ping selected,
ie. Flood Protection: Off
Statistics: Off

iPerf Throughput WAN-LAN: 279Mbps



Quite a difference between the two extremes!



All fine for Infinity, though, and likely(?) that it can in fact reach the 330Mbps of the most expensive FTTP option using only software NAT if tested with a more recent desktop PC.

There's a simulation of an earlier version of the firmware web interface (without guest wireless network) on the TP Link website so you can see the possible combinations of settings in context.

Nowhere does it say exactly what the SPI firewall tracks or inspects over and above the NAT table, unfortunately...

And I also can't find any information about how many sessions the TL-WDR4300 may be able to handle simultaneously. Asus are quoting 300,000 for both the RT-N65U and the RT-N66U...

Hope all that's a useful contribution, anyway. I've certainly had no problems with the TL-WDR4300 so far. I haven't properly tested the wireless performance, but it seems to work fine everywhere, even with the power turned right down, so I'm happy!

It looks like TP Link have gone for a maximum conntrack table size of 2¹³ with the TL-WDR4300 - so only 8000-odd entries. Is that just the Linux default, though?

I don't know how much it matters, but Asus obviously decided bigger was better! May be just a marketing thing, although I did read somewhere that you get better performance for entry access if conntrack_max and hashsize are set higher (memory allowing) even if you don't need to track a huge number of connections...

There's a tool available at smallnetbuilder.com which sets up UDP connections until your router can't track any more, which is what I used:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/mydownloads/max_sessi...

In reply to a post by Kper:

It looks like TP Link have gone for a maximum conntrack table size of 2¹³ with the TL-WDR4300 - so only 8000-odd entries. Is that just the Linux default, though?

Just a few years ago a maximum of 200 simultaneous connections on a consumer router was considered "good".

I don't know how much it matters, but Asus obviously decided bigger was better! May be just a marketing thing, although I did read somewhere that you get better performance for entry access if conntrack_max and hashsize are set higher (memory allowing) even if you don't need to track a huge number of connections...

Stick Openwrt on it and you can easily set your conntrack up to 128,000 or higher. I haven't tested the absolute maximum but anything over 8000 is ludicrous anyway.

For the record Openwrt also gives you considerably better software NAT performance than the stock firmware, though last I recall these TP-Link routers' stock firmware was usually just a really old and slightly modified version of Openwrt anyway.

Edited by deleted (Fri 09-Aug-13 10:57:12)