Change in bandwidth with different routers

[cartera]

Hello all,

I have been playing around with my home network of late and noticed some surprising (at least as far as I'm concerned) results.

For work I require a hardware VPN so I was using a Sonicwall TZ100W as my firewall and a asus rt-n56u as a access point because the TZ100's wireless is pants. With this my peak download rate was 45Mbps and upload 15Mbps.

I then bought a linksys E900 and flashed it with DD-WRT and used that instead of the Sonicwall, as soon as I plugged it in I noticed a 10Mbps increase in my download rate. Upload increase was neglible if any.

I then decided I wanted to change from having a firewall and AP to a all in one solution since there was no real need to have both so I bought a Asus RT-N66U, flashed it with DD-WRT. Now this router is amazing and I can't rate it enough, with DD-WRT it is off the charts! Much to my surprise I now had a peak bandwidth of 70Mbps down and 18Mbps up which is what my ISP originally quoted me when I got the line.

The results from the RT-N66U you could say is not surprising with it being a far superior router but the E900 vs. a TZ100? I'm confused, somebody please enlighten me.

Oh, and the setup on E900 and the Asus is identical.

Alastair

 

[DelJo63]

My gut reaction is - - cudos to DD-WRT.
There are three factors for routers (especially when they get real busy):

1. clock speed of the processor
2. memory
3. the code/firmware

It is well known that DD-WRT is very good (read tight/small) and that allows the hardware (cpu + memory) to perform at its best.

 

[cartera]

It is a shame I never tried it with the Asus stock firmware, that would make sense with the Asus's clock doubling the E900's. It just seems disappointing that a major player like Sonicwall (not to mention expensive) performs so poorly.

What did you mean by read tight/small?

Thanks for the quick reply.