Having bought a Cisco 871 and 881 routers for CCNA class practice I was wondering whether I can actually use one of them to replace my current router connected to my ISP. Although my current “router in chief” Asus RX3041 does serve me well, it doesn’t have a telnet/ssh option for remote access.
As my ISP does provide a bandwidth of 100Mbps (uplink/downlink) the question is that if the purposed device can handle such load. From here the whole idea of testing the throughput of all my home routers arose.
The Results
The following graph show the throughput test measured for WAN to LAN ports, the router speed test. Some tests were done with firewall, NAT, port forwarding and other services on and off, where appropriate. The Cisco routers were tested only with NAT activated.
| Device |
Bandwidth, Mbits/sec |
Transfered M.Bytes |
Note |
| SMC7004ABR w Fw |
17 |
21 |
firewall on |
| SMC7004ABR |
25 |
30 |
|
| Cisco 871 |
35 |
42 |
|
| Asus RX3041 |
95 |
113 |
firewall on |
| Cisco 881 |
95 |
114 |
|
| Asus RT N-16 w Fw |
130 |
149 |
firewall on |
| Asus RT N-16 |
133 |
158 |
|
Although the WAN to LAN speed test was the primary goal of the measurements, I’ve checked also the LAN to LAN speed test of the devices, a.k.a. the switch speed test, as shown in the next table:
The Test Bed
The tested device (router or switch) was used in a set up as in the above image, so that the WAN port of the device was connected to the laptop HP nx6325 and the LAN port to the HP t5735 thin client as a server, both computers running iperf as a measurement tool for the actual throughput test, under Linux platform (Ubuntu 10.10 and 10.04 respectively).
Both computers have a Gigabit network interface card with auto sensing, and in a “back to back speed test” it obtained a 216 Mbits/sec throughput, which it seems to be the upper limit with this given configuration.
The cable used were cat 5 S-FTP cables, 2-3 meters length. ethtool and mii-tool were used to check that interfaces are in 1000Mb/s mode.
On the server the following command was issued to start iperf in listening (server) mode:
linux-user@t5735:~$ iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
On the laptop, the corresponding command is:
iperf -c the IP address of the server
to instruct iperf to do the actual throughput test.
CONCLUSIONS
Although all devices are labeled 100Mbits/s (Fast Ethernet) or even Gigabit Ethernet on all ports, this is not always what it can handle.
THE BAD
The Asus RT-N16 router is labelled as Gigabit router but it’s WAN port speed is far from Gigabit capability but still over Fast Ethernet speed (this is good because many Fast Ethernet labelled routers does not reach 100 Mbits/sec)
The Cisco 871 and SMC Barricade 7004 are the most disappointing routers as are unable to route WAN to LAN at Fast Ethernet speed. I was expecting better performance from Cisco 871 device but no, it does not do it’s job, if you want more power, use Cisco 881 which it is “a totally different animal”.
THE GOOD
The Asus RX3041 and Cisco 881 router are “fair” routers, means that it does what it claims, to route packets at 100Mbits/sec speed. For a home router, Asus RX3041 is the best choice, being fast, small and easy to operate. If you have the required skills, Cisco 881 would be better, being flexible, fast and with much more abilities, but with bigger form factory.
I have let the ASUS RT-N16 as the last thing to mention, because, in fact, this is my favourite device. It does routing at higher speeds than Fast Ethernet (133 Mbits/sec with dd-wrt firmware), it is small, energy saver, easy to configure and, with this dd-wrt firmware, a very very powerful home router too (as it does NAS, print server, ssh, wireless, web server, etc, just to mention few of them).
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