In reply to a post by smouty:

In my experience ISP equipment is able to meet the advertised speeds and nothing more.

Which of course is all that you need.

There are certainly people who need better routing capabilities: those who use multi-WAN, or site-to-site VPNs, or inter-VLAN routing, or OSPF, or even QoS. Those people know who they are, and what equipment to meet their needs.

For everyone else, the ISP-supplied router will work just fine, with the proviso that a single router may not give whole-house wifi coverage. If that's a problem then some ISPs provide wifi extenders at extra cost - and if not, you can buy additional APs or mesh wifi which plug into the existing router.

Using an RT-AC86U and it works wonders on my 900/110 FTTP.

It's basically a value judgement, I tend to either use a Mikrotik RB4011iGS+RM(10xGigabit port router with a Quad-core 1.4Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM, SFP+ 10Gbps cage and desktop case) or run OPNsense or Untangle(Home Basic $50/year licence) on silent x86 hardware(Alpine passive cooler/no fans - special low power AMD CPU).

Untangle is the easiest to use for beginners, then OPNsense, then Mikrotik RouterOS. Downside to OPNsense is because it is open source you always run the risk that some future update is going to break something(pfSense suffers from that a lot).

Edited by Spud2003 (Tue 07-Dec-21 03:10:26)

In reply to a post by candlerb:

I haven't used the UDM/UDM-Pro, but people on this list have said it doesn't do a good job of PPPoE, so buyer beware.

Definitely, I was using a UDM Pro initially when upgrading from my Edgerouter Pro 8. Aside from the fact some settings/functionality was missing (e.g. missing NAT settings), PPPoE performance didn't max out on gigabit. Something buyers need to be aware of.

In reply to a post by Spud2003:

I tend to either use a Mikrotik RB4011iGS+RM(10xGigabit port router with a Quad-core 1.4Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM, SFP+ 10Gbps cage and desktop case)

Mikrotik, as advised to me here on the forum a short time ago, was the best move I did.

I'd also recommend Mikrotik if OP has some technical understanding at least. Otherwise maybe a newer ASUS router. I had an RT-AC68U a long time ago and it was reliable, had Marlin on it but it was used with FTTC back then, unlike its DSL modem variant (DSL-AC68U?) which had an unreliable modem sadly.

Hi All,
Thanks for all the replies. I am still on the lookout for a new Router.

I have had FTTP for some weeks now and my current router isnt saturating the line without hitting 100% CPU. I do run OpenVPN on it and Merlin firmware with some extras so the VRAM and CPU are struggling to saturate the 900Mb/s.

In reply to a post by jhorton88:

Using an RT-AC86U and it works wonders on my 900/110 FTTP.

Hi pal, maybe I am running more intensive tests and have more running in the background on the Route but although its a great router I think its a little underpowered for saturating the full speeds with several users and many Philips Hue/Ring devices and VPN, etc etc

Definately need to upgrade. Just dont know what to yet.

In reply to a post by mrc99:

The following site gives throughput figures for a lot of the consumer grade routers so may be worth a browse to compare the available kit and prices (in $$s).

You may need to fiddle with the filter settings to see what benchmark is the most suitable for your use case (available client wifi capabilities etc).

If you want to stick with Asus I'd have thought the RT-AX86U with Merlin firmware installed would be relatively future proof.

https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router/...

For now why not stick with the 68U and see what happens?

Thanks for the response, I did try the RT-AC68U for a few weeks but it is struggling. I was looking at the RT-AX86U and some other ASUS higherspec models. I've not decided on a router yet or found any great deals so still looking but appreciate your input and advice 👍

In reply to a post by Scoot:

Hi pal, maybe I am running more intensive tests and have more running in the background on the Route but although its a great router I think its a little underpowered for saturating the full speeds with several users and many Philips Hue/Ring devices and VPN, etc etc

Number of devices doesn't affect this. Its more likely the options within the router you have enabled.

If you're running Merlin, click on the Tools menu option, and then scroll down the panel, you should have a line labelled HW Acceleration, showing Runner and Flow Cache. Both of mine show Enabled.

Some of the filtering features disable one or both of these and that reduces the overall speeds the router can handle as it puts more load on the main CPU.

Edited by jchamier (Sun 26-Dec-21 12:55:31)

In reply to a post by jchamier:

If you're running Merlin, click on the Tools menu option, and then scroll down the panel, you should have a line labelled HW Acceleration, showing Runner and Flow Cache. Both of mine show Enabled.

Some of the filtering features disable one or both of these and that reduces the overall speeds the router can handle as it puts more load on the main CPU.

Do you use PPP?

I'm not sure about the current range of Asus routers but on the older models the hardware acceleration called "flow acceleration" wouldn't work on a connection with PPP.

I have "flow cache" enabled but I'm on Talktalk with no PPP.

I don't know if flow cache works the same as flow acceleration but if so it won't work with PPP.

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

Do you use PPP?

not currently, as on Virgin Media 200 Mbps.

I'm not sure about the current range of Asus routers but on the older models the hardware acceleration called "flow acceleration" wouldn't work on a connection with PPP.

I have "flow cache" enabled but I'm on Talktalk with no PPP.

I don't know if flow cache works the same as flow acceleration but if so it won't work with PPP.

Gotcha, thanks, that may have changed since I moved from my old Openreach based service.

Edited by jchamier (Mon 27-Dec-21 23:54:58)

I'm using PPP on my AX88U, but only with a ~60Mbps VDSL connection, both Runner and Flow cache are showing as enabled, but its barely ticking over at that speed. I'm due 500/75 in a week or two so will see how things go then. Seen quite a few posts on the BT forum and the odd one on SNB where people are getting lower speeds on their Asus routers.