Cisco.

It’s a prime example of “Don’t get attached to the company just because of one thing.” I have three of their routers that I bought used. WRT160N, WRT310N, and WRT610N. They all looked aesthetically pleasing and I thought all would be fine and dandy. Until I got a internet boost. Going from 12/1.5 up/down to 250/25 up/down.

HOWEVER, MY ROUTERS CANNOT REACH EVEN HALF THE SPEED DOWN.

Best part was when I called, they said that they couldn’t fix it because of one thing that all the routers have in common.

Legacy.

I’ve tried dd-wrt all with no luck. And they have the audacity to recommend another product of theirs?!?

Idk if this is still an ongoing situation but did you try wired or 5 GHz wifi or just 2.4 GHz wifi?

@electrineer all of it.

@Gerrymandered maybe you had a cable that doesn't support faster speeds (e.g. only two pairs)

@electrineer I’ve tried different cables, multiple cat 5e.
I have a cat 6 coming in from a different router and achieved 300mbps direct to my computer :/

From https://cnet.com/products/...
WAN: 1 x 10Base-T/100Base-TX - RJ-45

There's the issue. The hardware can't do any more than 100Mbps.

@Condor well that’s crap because the product literally has GIGABIT written on it!!!

Makes me hate them even more. But thanks for the info.

EDIT:// that’s the 160n, the others are gigabit. My stance still stands.

@Gerrymandered Ah, I see. Well yeah a gigabit router should easily be able to do 1Gbps on its WAN port too, unless there's some kind of built-in modem that only does up to this or that frequency/bandwidth. Not sure why it wouldn't be able to do it on its WAN port then. Have you tried putting it behind another Gigabit network and communicating from a machine behind the Linksys to a machine in the other network? Just to be sure that it's really a router issue and not something with the ISP (those fuckers are known to advertise "ideal" speeds in the hundreds of Mbps while delivering only a fraction of that). My connection for example is supposed to be 100/40Mbps, but I'm only getting around 60/25. The reason for that is apparently the distance from my router to the DSLAM (which is in this apartment building's basement, go figure..)

@Condor I have not, however since it was always behind a gigabit network, I’ve gotten the speeds on the main network but when tunneling through my network, it falls short. Note all of the lan ports are fine, I’ve got literal gigabit speeds from one to another. Also one thing to note, it’s not capped at 100 per se. I’ve seen maybe 120 on it, dunno if that might help.

@Gerrymandered Hmm.. maybe power saving or something like that. Do test from the Cisco network to an external machine though. But be sure to omit encryption protocols like SSH, as they may cap the speeds due to limited CPU and entropy resources. I've found that FTP and SMB both work great in terms of expediency, because there's no cryptographic overhead. Copying a file from ramdisk on one host to ramdisk on another should also eliminate disk I/O saturation. Oh, also.. are you getting 250Mbps down on hosts in the main network? If not, I'd definitely start looking at the ISP.

@Condor here’s a picture I drew. Hopefully it makes sense. Colors are self explanatory. Let me know if they aren’t

@Gerrymandered Hmm.. assuming that the server has to remain online and behind the WRT610N, maybe consider wiring it temporarily as: Server <=> WRT610N, WRT610N <=> Main, PC <=> Main. Be sure to remove all other connections momentarily, so that the traffic has to flow from the server into the WRT610N, through the integrated switch in the main, onwards into the PC, without any direct or semi-direct (through the integrated switch in the WRT610N) connection, because that'd skew the results. If that shows 1Gbps, the WRT610N at least should be doing fine. If not, maybe check power saving options and things like that.. my Fritz!Box 7490 for example has it turned on by default, even on the LAN ports. Otherwise it's probably an issue further upstream, in the main's modem or something with the ISP. Perhaps the admin page of the main router can tell you what the actual link speeds to the ISP are.

I’ll take a look and report back to you once I get home! Thanks @Condor

@Condor here’s what I’ve done.
Sorry for drawing everything...

All connections are Ethernet and using SMB as protocol

@Gerrymandered seems like an issue in that WRT router then yeah.. perhaps it's just junk disguised as good hardware for prosumers after all. What I'd recommend would be way overkill for a home network, but a Linux router (pfSense or even raw iptables, dhcpd, and named) would be pretty stable, customizable and high-performance (since you're working with PC hardware instead of embedded ARM/RISC stuff). That's at least what I'm migrating my network to, with several separate Proxmox containers. Named works a treat, still having some troubles with ISC dhcpd, and perhaps if I get a modem card and some kind of introduction into VDSL from my ISP, I'll completely replace my FB7490 with native Linux hard-/software. Far better than the proprietary garbage from AVM that €200+ gets you anyway.

@Condor awesome, thanks for rediagnostics. Might’ve caught something I didn’t but in any case, I might just find some good deal on a netgear router and go with that.

Side note: I got a good laugh reading that last comment; I didn’t understand a few acronyms but too tired to care.

Good day!

Please note that if you have an older device on the Wi-Fi network (802.11b/g, for example) it'll slow down the entire damn network. This can also apply to the wired network on some routers.

Also, your router may be .11b/g/n or .11b/g, or, if not, might be configured incorrectly.

@Parzi true but I’ve done resets and had it at one point with just a wired connection. Upgraded to a new router and all my issues are solved.