In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

It may be the HH3 can manage over 700 Meg i.e. still suffers from PPPoE issues if that is the cause.

Tried Asus support, they might recommend different firmware.

The N66U has a reasonably vibrant range of firmware options in tomato, and people have been talking about that on here, so worth a look.

Asus support were absolutely useless. They came back with canned responses for improving Wifi coverage (I specified it was a GigE connection), and in the end I just asked them to pass my request on to the firmware developers, which they said they would. I won't hold my breath.

At this stage I'm 90% sure I'm returning the Asus to try something else.

In reply to a post by David_W:

FreeBSD - and therefore pfSense - doesn't currently support RFC 4638, so is limited to a 1492 byte MTU on PPPoE. I've scoped out what needs doing to add this support, and hope to get round to implementing it and ultimately submitting patches, but I have no timescale for this work as I'm very busy at the moment.

PPPoE uses mpd for PPPoE, which does a limited amount of work in userland but the majority using the kernel's netgraph system. The use of netgraph means I can't recycle any of the work on implementing RFC 4638 in NetBSD and OpenBSD, which implement PPPoE very differently.

I'm 99% certain I will need a modest patch to ng_pppoe.c, as much of the PPPoE negotiation is done in the kernel without calling the userland callback. The necessary kernel patch is no more ambitious in scale than a patch I've previously had accepted for inclusion in FreeBSD. The userland support is pretty straightforward once the kernel support is in place.

If you want to use RFC 4638 for a 1500 byte MTU on BT Openreach FTTx, you need to select a network controller that supports jumbo frames of at least 1508 bytes. Many gigabit controllers do support jumbo frames, though the FreeBSD 8.1 manpage for the re(4) driver isn't drawn on whether jumbo support is available for the 8111EVL controllers on the Jetway board you mention.

This is a whole fascinating new area to focus on. As you said, pfSense doesn't support RFC 4638, and neither does RouterOS, which I tested last night on a VM (and performed very well, I got up to 310 Mbps). I can set the MTU of the WAN card to 1508, and the MTU of the PPPoE connection to 1500, but the PPPoE connection gets forced back to 1492, which is apparently expected behaviour as you haven't negotiated with the PPPoE head end.

If pfSense and RouterOS don't support it, the Asus router I currently have doesn't support it, and I couldn't find any evidence of Draytek supporting it, it sounds like it could be a difficult avenue to pursue.

In reply to a post by David_W:

FreeBSD - and therefore pfSense - doesn't currently support RFC 4638, so is limited to a 1492 byte MTU on PPPoE. I've scoped out what needs doing to add this support, and hope to get round to implementing it and ultimately submitting patches, but I have no timescale for this work as I'm very busy at the moment.

From your sig, do you work for Zen? It looks like AA ISP have implemented their own custom fix for 1500 MTU on routers that don't support RFC 4638. Do you know anything about this?

http://wiki.aa.org.uk/index.php/RouterOS#1500_MTU_ov...

Oh, and PS, I tried to sign up with Zen, but they weren't interested (FTTP).

Thanks everyone for this amazing thread. Please keep the thoughts coming!

In reply to a post by rotor2k:

So now that I know the Asus is not capable of handling the throughput, I have my doubts about the Draytek too. I might end up ordering that anyway and returning it if it doesn't fit the bill.

Interesting - have you pinged MrSaffron on this site as he wrote the review that claimed over 600megabit throughput download and 500 megabit upload.

Various options, there's some other Drayteks that have slightly better internals, just look around their site.

Also Cisco do various low end routers e.g. RV180 that could do the job, and they aren't that badly priced unlike most other Cisco gear.

Also Tp-link do some that should be capable as well, but whether they are better than the ASUS you already tried who knows.

really your only guaranteed way of ensuring high speed is if you have an already existing home server and just upgrade it with a good server level NIC and let the server do all the routing work. Good luck with that though as you really have to know what you are doing to get that setup right.

Check out Drayteks comparison sheet...
Draytek Compare
You will see the firewall performance figures.

The 2130 alluded to here can do 500Mb\s.
The 2850 mentioned as well can do 90Mb\s
My 2920 can do 100Mb\s

In reading I have seen these figures are conservative. I guess, as already stated, it depends on how many rules you have inplemented.

Be good to know the impact PPPoE has on those numbers. Many routers have some acceleration for normal IP traffic but it seems handle PPP in software. Wonder if these go that way?

In reply to a post by drummerjohn:

Check out Drayteks comparison sheet...
Draytek Compare
You will see the firewall performance figures.

The 2130 alluded to here can do 500Mb\s.
The 2850 mentioned as well can do 90Mb\s
My 2920 can do 100Mb\s

In reading I have seen these figures are conservative. I guess, as already stated, it depends on how many rules you have inplemented.

Those numbers are always raw throughput. As soon as you tack on PPPoE, the numbers plummet.

With that draytek list most of the products has been updated

the 2130n was originaly up to 500mb but has been updated to 800mb for sure 100% even is at their official web saying this
The 2920 has been updated to 150 mb
2850 is still up to 90mb

It should work and get these speeds with any kind of connection (static or dynamic ip,pppoe etc) but of course let us know what they saying cos i am interesting as well
as i am direct to exchange and if the cost is not much (hoping i am near by 60 meters from the FTTC cabinet) i will think about FTTP on demand

I am not working for draytek but as you... i m very happy with a 2850 and an adsl & VM connection

Like you said if you order with a decent on line shop they will return your money if can not do the speeds but the draytek should let you know before you get it

Edited by deleted (Fri 18-Jan-13 17:23:09)