[PLUG] Router configuration

Daniel Bolduc dan at computatrumdesign.com
Thu Oct 26 17:25:55 UTC 2017


Rich,

That is a very old unit.

SmallNetBuilder's review of it from 2002 shows its maximum upload and
download throughput as about 7 mbps:
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-reviews/24591-
netgearprosafevpnfirewallreview?showall=&start=6

If you're getting within 1-2 mbps of 7 mbps download speeds, then you're
basically at the limit of your router's capabilities.

The limitation here is essentially the hardware resources of the device.
Not bad performance for 2002, but newer gear will have much higher specs
and throughput. Also keep in mind that as you enable features on the
firewall (such as packet inspection), this will add to the compute overhead
and reduce throughput performance.

For an all-in-one type wireless router replacement I would recommend
Synology's routers as they run a linux based OS and have lots of great VPN
and security features. For a single-purpose unit similar to your netgear,
Ubiquiti's edgerouter line also offers great performance for the price. If
you want to go full open source you can get a router compatible with
OpenWRT or Tomato such as the old Linksys wrt54g, or you can put a network
card into an old desktop PC you're not using and install pfsense on it. A
desktop PC acting as a router will have more compute power than just about
any network device on the market as long as you're okay with the increased
power consumption.

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 9:17 AM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com>
wrote:

>    I'm not getting the expected data transfer speeds on the fiber network.
> Frontier's tech support shows the correct speeds on their network side so
> it
> must be something here.
>
>    The hardware on the end of the Frontier cat5 is the Netgear VFS318
> router.
> I find nothing in the admin pages that might throttle data transfer speeds,
> but one of you experienced network admins might.
>
>    This is the router status page:
>
> Router Status
> System Name             FVS318
> Firmware Version        V2.3 Feb. 5 2004
>
> WAN Port:
> MAC Address             00:09:5B:F9:0D:11
> IP Address              50.126.108.78
> DHCP    No
> IP Subnet Mask          255.255.255.252
> Domain Name Server      74.40.74.40
>                         74.40.74.41
>
> LAN Port:
> MAC Address     00:09:5B:F9:0D:10
> IP Address      192.168.55.4
> DHCP    No
> IP Subnet Mask  255.255.255.0
>
>    The only port opened on the router is 25 (smtp) to allow incoming mail.
> I
> just added port 80 (http), but that made no difference in the
> speedtest.net
> testing; since closed.
>
>    I've run the Netgear diagnostics and rebooted the router. No difference
> in
> speeds.
>
>    Are there other things here I can test to diagnose where the problem
> source is located?
>
> TIA,
>
> Rich
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