Question gigabit router advice (backstory included)

[sb5533]

hello all!

have been a cable user all my life, but recently, we were lucky enough to get a fiber optic option through a company called MetroNet. I decided to have them install a 1GB fiber connection (an upgrade from the 300/30 cable connection i was using). The router they install with there connection is the Eero Pro 6E tri band router.

Now, this router is a mesh router, and only has 1 ethernet port on the back. I have my main PC hard wired and i have a couple of devices on wifi. I used speed test from Ookla to test my internet speed.

On the hard wired PC, im good, i get about 1GB up and 1GB down +/- a little here and there. However, on my phone, depending on where im at in the house, my download speed changes. For example, if im in the same room as my router, i get about 400 to 600mbps download, however, if I move to the back of the house, i get about 150mbps.

I went to best buy to see if they have the expansion nodes for the 6e pro and they dont, id probably have to order them from amazon. However, i decided i was going to go another route and just buy a new gigabit router, with wifi 7 and a larger wifi coverage. So, i went to best buy and got the Nighthawk RS500. Which has wifi 7, tri band and coverage up to 3000 sq ft. Installing this gave me more ethernet ports and gave me a strong signal throughout the house. i was getting 400-600mbps in the room with the router and in the back rooms.

I started to run some speed test, just because i wanted to see if everything was performing right. and using Ookla, i ran a few tests and what I noticed is, while the latency was around 25 to 35 ms on the download, when you clicked on details, it showed a "high" of 145 to 230 ms. Im assuming it was having latency spikes. This happened consistently with this router. I decided to hook the eero back up and run some test and noticed that the latency was in the low 20's and the "high" in the details was around the same..low to mid 20's, occasionally hitting around 150ms, but always going back down to highs of low 20's. So I hooked the nighhawk back up and tested again, and sure enough, main latency was mid 20's but "high" was back up to over 140ms.

Now, im not sure if these spikes mean anything or not...i do game some, so i know that latency is very important. So i decided to take that router back and stick with the eero for now, until i figure out what is going on. So i thought i would reach out.

Now, my house is only 1700 sq ft, so Im not sure if a mesh router is the way to go or just a standard router.

I was thinking about getting the ASUS BE-96U tri band router and giving it a try, but wasnt sure if i was going to end up with the same latency spikes as the nighthawk router.

im just curious are those spikes normal? or should they always be low like the main latency?

thoughts on an eero mesh router vs a traditional router?

thanks!

 

[BFG-9000]

I'd suggest a cheap gigabit switch to plug into the Eero so everything that needs speed is wired. 150Mbps is plenty for a phone where you don't download large files to it.

 

[sb5533]

thanks. any thoughts on the latency "spikes"? should i even be concerned about those "highs" of 140 to 200+? or are they just normal and not to be worried about?

 

[BFG-9000]

By applying an AQM QoS such as CAKE or fq_coDel to the downloads, it's a simple matter to get latency down below 20ms all of the time. Your previous cable ISP could likely get that with no QoS in the router at all, because PIE was baked into the Docsis 3.1 standard so you had hardware QoS in the modem.

The problem is add-on QoS is generally performed in software and not only is this very CPU-intensive, but it also disables most of the usual hardware acceleration features that barely allow most puny-CPU routers to saturate a gigabit WAN link in hardware without QoS. Most consumer routers aren't going to have anywhere near the CPU power required to do this so the usual suggestion has long been an x86 box (that is, a spare PC) as the router running pfSense, OPNsense, or M0n0wall derivatives if you actually want to apply QoS to gigabit WAN. Consumer routers essentially have the equivalent of an old phone CPU that's wildly overclocked because, well it's plugged into the wall so who cares about efficiency as it doesn't have to run on battery. But it's just not enough to traffic shape gigabit.

There are exceptions of course so you would have to specifically look for a router that claims to be capable of this, usually with some dedicated hardware. And even one of the most popular routers for third-party firmware, the 10-year old R7800, has a very beta-ish NSS build of OpenWRT from ACwifidude that can offload/hardware-accelerate fq_coDel using the auxiliary NSS cores to 940+ Mbps, which is pretty much gigabit line speed. It can perform no other type of QoS in hardware but that can get the job done if you are willing to put up with some bugginess. Would I suggest such a router in 2025? No, because 23.05 reaches the end of support in only 4 months, and newer OpenWRT builds switched to DSA which is incompatible with NSS hardware offloading.

As an aside, the latency spikes are "Bufferbloat" which means that when for whatever reason packets are not promptly delivered (usually from a bottleneck on the way to you), they accumulate in the memory buffers of every device from that upstream to the source, to get delivered very late. How AQM works is it simply discards random packets so the upstream routers know to limit speeds to not fill these buffers (they know it didn't arrive, because no ACK response is sent back). The QoS part is your router choosing to discard less time-sensitive packets rather than higher priority ones like your Skype call.

 

[sb5533]

you suggest using a spare PC AS youre router? i happen to have a spare PC that i dont use. its about 10 years old, but still works just fine. you are saying i can use it as a router somehow?

 

[BFG-9000]

Well sure, all it needs is to have two NIC ports and one of the software packages I mentioned installed. You add a cheap network switch and since it's on all of the time, any drives inside can be used as a high performance NAS too. You could even add a wifi card so it would be a wireless router.

The only thing is it would probably have a lot higher power consumption than the usual router-in-a-box with a wall wart. But if you ever get multi-gigabit ISP speeds, such a PC would be the only thing that could keep up.

 

[bill001g]

You are going to have to be a bit more clear of how you were testing.

First wifi7 does not actually have more coverage that older versions of wifi. This distance the signal goes is regulated by the transmit power which has not changed....technically the more advanced types of wifi encoding have slightly less power allowed.

Now back to a key question. Are you seing this latency spike on ethernet or is it only on wifi. This is a fundemental design "flaw?" of how wifi works. Wifi unlike ethernet attempt to do error correction and data retransmission mostly because it gets much more damaged data than ethernet. This data retransmission takes time and is why you see latency spikes.

You should never see latency spikes on ethernet. Your router "should" never cause latency spikes. Modern routers run the NAT function in a hardware assist. Even the very cheapest routers have this. In some ways cheap routers might be better because they have less features....most of which you are not actually going to use. The problem is this hardware assisted NAT bypasses the much slower cpu chip in the router. When you use any feature that requires seeing the data...say QoS of any kind.. the data must now pass the CPU chip. The CPU chip must now do both the feature you want as well as the NAT feature which is very CPU compute intensive at high data rates.

From the above post you want to disable any kind of QoS or bufferbloat support. In many cases using this function actually causes bufferbloat. Bufferbloat is a extremely old and outdate concept. You only get bufferbloat if you are attempting to exceed you bandwidth, and this is extremely hard to do on a 1gbit connection. The only other source of delays is the router CPU but the hardware NAT function bypasses that.

You should not look to use a PC as a router unless you have some need for some very specific feature. VPN or advanced data filters are a example of reasons to use a PC. For the vast majority of people the hardware NAT assist is really the only function they are using in the router.

Now again if you are talking wifi that is just something you live with. The only application that is actually affected by latency spikes is online games everything else can use buffers to hide the problem. This is why you see everyone say never play online games on wifi.

 

[sb5533]

Well sure, all it needs is to have two NIC ports and one of the software packages I mentioned installed. You add a cheap network switch and since it's on all of the time, any drives inside can be used as a high performance NAS too. You could even add a wifi card so it would be a wireless router.

The only thing is it would probably have a lot higher power consumption than the usual router-in-a-box with a wall wart. But if you ever get multi-gigabit ISP speeds, such a PC would be the only thing that could keep up.

MetroNet offers speeds up to 5GB. I dont need that much so I just opt for 1GB

interesting on using the PC as a router/firewall though, ill have to explore that later. So you are saying that store bought routers cant properly handle the speed of even 1GB? or they cant properly handle speeds higher than that?

 

[sb5533]

ou are going to have to be a bit more clear of how you were testing.

i was just using the speed test by Ookla test. Its just an online speed testing tool.

First wifi7 does not actually have more coverage that older versions of wifi. This distance the signal goes is regulated by the transmit power which has not changed....technically the more advanced types of wifi encoding have slightly less power allowed.

sure, i was just mentioning the options the router has.

 

[sb5533]

Now back to a key question. Are you seing this latency spike on ethernet or is it only on wifi.

this was on hard wired..ethernet.

ou should never see latency spikes on ethernet. Your router "should" never cause latency spikes.

sure, but it was strange, on the eero router, the spikes would happen, but very infrequently. On the nighthawk router, they would happen all the time. When the test was over, it would so the upload latency to be about 20 to 30ms and download latency to be mid 30ms. but if you clicked on the "details" option where it would give you a little more in depth review, it under the latency heading it would say "high" and that number would generally be around 140-mid 200's ms latency. I assume these are lag spikes happening.

The problem is this hardware assisted NAT bypasses the much slower cpu chip in the router.

i dont know how much power is needed, this ASUS shows to have a 2.6Ghz quad core processor. Is that good for routers?

Now again if you are talking wifi that is just something you live with

i understand, these variations are coming from the haredwired PC. The eeros seems to have few if any spikes, but the nighthawk router had continuous spikes.

i tend to favor traditional routers, because ive never used a mesh router. the eero router has very few options and im not sure what security, i think it still uses WPA2, whereas the new routes use WPA3. Also, for the wifi, this eero router just doesnt push the signal as strong all over the house, which is why i was looking at traditional routers with a larger coverage. But, since I game, im also concerned about those lag spikes.

so i thought id get some advice from you folks

thanks

 

[bill001g]

First before you chase numbers on a report does the latency actually affect you. The main complain people have about lag spikes is it causes issue in a game.

The best test to see if it is the router is to plug directly into the ISP modem. If the ISP device is also a router you likely want to set it to bridge mode if you are using another router in front of it.

If you still see lag spikes on latency numbers it is likely it is something in the path between your house, your ISP and other ISP. You can not generally fix or do anything about this.

Hard to say why a router would cause lag spikes on ethernet. Again it doesn't matter if the asus has a 2.6g quad core. The traffic is bypassing the cpu chip. By default most the feature that require the CPU to see traffic are off. It would be more for running the router as a NAS or something that it uses CPU.

Maybe try a much simpler test. Run tracert 8.8.8.8 This is only to get the IP in the path. Now leave constant ping run to hop 2 which should be the first router outside your house in the ISP network. If you have mulitple routers you might have to use a higher hop number. The key is do you see latency spikes using this simple test. If not it is likley not the router or anything inside your house.

None of this though is related to the wifi function. The wifi function is in a different CPU/chip dedicated to the wifi process. It might exist on the same silicon but it functions as a seperate unit. Most wifi features on routers are smoke and mirrors that marketing guys like. You have to remember that your end device is 1/2 the connection.

As a example say you are using wifi7 and bonding 2.4,5, 6 radios together and then using 4x4 mimo. You get a really impressive big number to put on the box for speed. The problem is first almost no end user device has 4 antenna. I also do not think there is any consumer device that can do the bonding or the 3 radios. Routers have 3 different radio chips where end devices only have 1 that can switch to any frequency. It is going to add quite a bit of cost to the end device to have 3 actual radio chips. Since most wifi devices are portable it is not likely they will ever have 3 radio chips. It takse up more space on the main board and it uses more battery power.

WPA2 and WPA3 is for the tin foil hat guys. Therotically the government could sit in a van in front of your house and try to hack into your wifi with their large super computers. For the rest of us you might as well consider WPA2 uncrackable.

 

[sb5533]

irst before you chase numbers on a report does the latency actually affect you. The main complain people have about lag spikes is it causes issue in a game.

sure, and gaming would be the area of application i would be looking at, not an issue for anything else.

The best test to see if it is the router is to plug directly into the ISP modem.

there is no modem, i mean, there is an ONT attached to the wall, which comes directly from the fiber line outside into the ONT, and then from there to the router. You can plug directly from the ONT into the computer?

Maybe try a much simpler test. Run tracert 8.8.8.8

i did this, and it was 7 hops, nothing over 12ms, but again, this was with the eero router..i dont have the nighthawk router anymore as i returned it while i researched the issue.

None of this though is related to the wifi function.

sure, and im not concerned with latency in my wifi. Only my cell phone, roku, home theater recevier and security system runs via wifi.


i guess i could stay with the eero, execpt for 3 issues, 1) only 1 ethernet port, which can be remedied with a switch, 2) weak wifi signal, dont get good signal in the back of the house,and 3) eero seems to have few options. the settings are all app based, but there really isnt any way to change settings, doest appear to be a web based login to change router settings. You cant enable or disable SSID broadcast, with my older ASUS router, you could have each band have it's own SSID, username, and login. With eero, it automatically assigns everything, you have no control of which device is placed on which band. No ability to port forward, no ability to block ports. Really, no ability to change any settings at all. It has few option.

Now i hear eero is a good router (made by amazon), but, it lacks any ability to customize, assign devices to specific bands (if you wanted to), and has weak wifi signal beyond the room that the router if physically located in.

Thanks again for the help!