Some router ramblings...

[lparsons21]

About a year ago my trusty Apple Time Capsule started getting wonky with wifi. It would just drop out altogether and require a reboot to get it back. As it worsened I decided to get something different.

Seems all the rage is Mesh router systems, and the reviews led me to the TP-Link M5 Deco system. Hit all the right buttons for me. Simple to setup even if it didn't offer some of the more advanced tweaks, Trend Micro's Internet security built in with 3-year subscription and they units are small and fairly attractive.

At the time I had Mediacom's 100/10 service. Speedtest with the Deco's showed about 90Mbps which was a bit slower than I had been getting with the Apple Airport, but not a big deal I thought. Little did I know how much difference it would make. I upped my internet service to 200/20. Speedtest never got above 100Mbps with it, got Mediacom to come out and my cable modem was providing proper service, so it had to be the router. I let it go on for awhile, but finally decided this wasn't right and wondered if others were seeing the issue. Yep, a fair number of complaints with no solutions from either TP-Link or users. Conjecture was that it was the security suite at first, but killing that didn't help. Then the QOS settings were thought to be the culprit, but no, that wasn't it either. My thoughts are that the 3 units are just too damned chatty amongst each other and that was sucking the bandwidth. Don't know if I'm right or not,

So yesterday I went and got a Linksys Maxstream 1900 router. WOW! That made a hell of a difference! Now speediest shows 210/28 fairly consistently and the drop off from the furthest distance I would ever be from it showed 180/20 minimum. And this isn't even a Mesh system. My house is about 1600 sq. ft. ranch style all one floor. Downside is no Internet Security, I'll take a look at using opendns to accomplish at least some of that.

Turns out there are two mfgs that are doing Trend's Internet Security. ASUS and TP-Link.

 

[EarDemon]

I can't comment on your situation but I can say without a doubt security software can and does have an impact on WAN speeds. With Intrusion Prevention enabled on Symantec Endpoint Protection I can only achieve 500 to 600 Mbps, with it turned off I'm at 920 to 940, exactly where I should be. And it sounds like the Trend Micro security is embedded into the router firmware so you have everything covered on a global level. Not a fan of that personally unless you go all out and get something like a SonicWall NSA or Cisco ASA with a contract. Now I have no problem with simple web filtering at router level, I have garbage sites like facebook.com and twitter.com blocked on my router, but I wouldn't use it for anything else major.

I too live in a smaller one story house, if I had a larger house and needed more coverage, I'd just add wireless access points that terminate back to a wired router via CAT6 instead of dealing with this newfangled mesh stuff or putting in repeaters. If I had a mansion I'd have Cisco Catalyst 9000s with fiber uplink and Aironet 4800s throughout.

At my under the table side job they bought a Ubiquity mesh wifi system last year. After two hours I threw my hands up in the air and gave up and told them to have their real IT guy set it up. I am so used to configuring routers, WAPs and switches locally via a LAN GUI and I just can't comprehend this new way of doing things. Now I know how the old grizzled veterans felt when you no longer needed a console cable and extensive CLI knowledge of configuration commands.

I don't really use wifi for anything beside my collection of smart speakers and other IoT junk, and the only wireless AC device I have is my phone, but I can get a good 350 Mbps on the other side of the house on my phone with my lowly SMB AP that's mounted on my bedroom wall.

 

[lparsons21]

Thanks for the comments.

I tried turning off the Trend stuff but it had no effect, nor did twiddling the quality of service stuff with no help. I’ve now got OpenDNS in my 3 dns settings so I’ll get some protection with no apparent hit on speed.


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