[krusadr]

Hi folks,

This is my first post!

I have a router Belkin Share N300 (F7D3302 v1) but yesterday it's power adapter blew up and I had to go back to my TP-Link TL-WR841N v11 EU router which has a problem with download speed.

I live in Mumbai, India and am subscribed to a PPPoE internet service so all I get at home is an Ethernet wire and it's bound to my TP-Link router's MAC address (which I had configured in my Belkin model), however when I connect my work laptop to the wire directly, I get the full 20 Mbps speed that I pay for.

But if I use the TP-Link router, I don't get that much download speed.

Please see the attached screenshots for speedtest.net results and here are the result links:

pppoe speedtest.net result URL: https://www.speedtest.net/result/9351782334
router lan speedtest.net result URL: https://www.speedtest.net/result/9351826812 (Wireless radio was turned off)
wifi speedtest.net result URL: https://www.speedtest.net/result/9351850598
And here's the speedtest.net result

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tpuEOUp--3Kd35q1Hjl3BtVZJOa1nlcT/view?usp=sharing (Since the forum allows only 3 attachments)

As you can see from the speedtest results, I do not have any problem with the upload speed and am getting almost the full upload speed.

I have searched through the forum and found according to this post that r40863 is better for routers like the TP-Link TL-WR841N v11 EU who have 4 MB flash and 32 MB RAM but my problem does not seem to go away even after flashing DD-WRT (Yes, the problem was there in the original router firmware as well, hence I was using the Belkin one, but unfortunately it's dead right now).

I would like to add that sometimes I do get full 20 Mbps download speed on the router, but any subsequent tests do not replicate the result.

Due to the coronavirus situation, India is in lock down and neither WiFi routers nor power adapters are being sold either online or in shops, so I would really appreciate it if anyone can help me out here, since I am basically stuck at home and I do need to work from home, but can't really due to the slow internet speed coming from the TP-Link router.

Thanks for your time!

[msoengineer]

Please take a look at my signature, the first two links should be able to help you out in tweaking the wifi settings. Try to match all the settings that match up to the picture.

What are the clients that are connecting to the WR841N?
What kind of signal are they receiving? That is helpful information too.

[krusadr]

Hi msoengineer,

I had a look at the links and I have now changed my config as attached.

Still the speedtest result is not giving me the desired download speed:
https://www.speedtest.net/result/9352274225

As for the rest of your questions:
1) As of now, there are only 2 clients connecting to WR841N: my Android smartphone (OnePlus 5T) and the work laptop HP 348 G5 with a Intel Wireless AC 9560

2) Please see attached screenshot as for the signals they are receiving. Also when I am doing the speedtests, I am sitting right in front of the router.
The EB-BA ending MAC address device is my work laptop whereas the E0-EA ending is my smartphone.

But I do want to note that it's not just the wifi which is slow, when I disable the wifi and connect the work laptop to the LAN port on the router I am still not getting the full download speed.

Is there any command I can do to monitor why is it limiting?

Also, PS, I am not using QoS as well.

Thanks for your time!

[egc]

Have you enabled Shortcut Forwarding Engine on the setup page?

[krusadr]

Hi egc,

No, I havent enabled it.

Please see attached screenshot of the setup page and let me know what all should I turn on / off in order to get the full download speed from this TP-Link TL-WR841N router.

[msoengineer]

Change the rts/cts threshold value from 500 to 980, 500 is way way too low...

try changing the tx power to 30, the router will default to the highest it can output, and whatever is hard baked into the chipset firmware, but most likely not more than 24dBm.

make beacon interval 101, you don't have dual wifi and 191 would be for the second radio.

Change ack timing to 1350.

Your connection is too slow to warrant using the shorcut forward engine. That will only be useful for connections >100 mbps, but you can try and see if makes any difference having it turned on. The WR841N is a rather weak CPU router, but should be ok on speeds <=75 mbps.

If you are getting slow speed even using LAN, something else is suspect....like the actual lan cables being used. Make sure the LAN shows connecting at 100mbps on the NIC status/properties. Also take a peek at Setup>switch_config in the gui and see what colors are above the ports. Your's should be yellow if connecting at 100mbps. The issue is that router only has 100 mbps ports and no 1000 mbps ports.

Make sure the router to modem cable is indeed cat 5e, or better, to rule out the cable being an issue. Also make sure the modem to router cable is plugged in all the way. Sometimes a loose connection can ruin things.

Last, did you reboot the modem when you switched the routers? sometimes the modem may not give full speed to a new mac address...

[egc]

Well enable it, reboot the router wait a minute and do a speedtest

[kernel-panic69]

Please limit image width to 790-800 pixels or post your images to an image hosting site like imgur and link them. I already fixed your posts. Thank you.

[krusadr]

Thanks kernel-panic69, I will keep that in mind.

@egc I don't know what happened, but I am now getting slightly faster download speed, but my upload speed has come down too.

@msoengineer: I have changed the wifi settings accordingly and had not seen any result, however after changing the Shortcut Forwarding engine to Enabled and rebooting the router I now have this result:


So the observations are:
1) My download speed has gone up
2) My upload speed has come down.

Also @msoengineer, I tried replacing the cables, but am getting the same result and I was getting full speed with my Belkin router, so there is something most certainly wrong somewhere in software.

[kernel-panic69]

Is ppp line compression absolutely required to connect? Not even sure SFE will make much difference on this router. Only other thing is tuning the tcp buffer sizes, but it's not going to yield "WOW" performance increase.

[servicetech]

[msoengineer]

All your numbers look very suspicious...as if limited to 10mbps...I would install the latest build of dd-wrt, perform a full reset, and start setting everything up from ground zero. Something is wrong.

Telnet into the router and issue the command: nvram erase && reboot

I wonder if your router may have been hacked due to an older build.

[krusadr]

@kernel-panic69: ppp line compression is not required and it does not improve my download speed even if I enable or disable it.

@servicetech:
1) The perfect 19 Mbps upload and download speeds that you can see in my original post are when I connect the PPPoE cable directly to my work laptop which has a Gigabit Ethernet port, so I am pretty sure it's not related to the WAN port of the PPPoE box. Besides, I was getting full speeds on my Belkin router with the same WAN PPPoE cable.

2) This is my ifconfig output:

[kernel-panic69]

You may have to drop the MTU even further. This may take some experimentation. 1492 down through about 1432 is the range that seems to come to mind, if I'm not losing my mind. Perhaps MSOE can chime in with a better answer.

[krusadr]

I have reverted to stock firmware using webrevert but still it's not giving me any speed improvement.

I had installed DD-WRT by first flashing the factory-to-ddwrt.bin image and then the webflash.

I hope I was doing that right, cause if not, what is the other way?

I want to make sure that I do the DD-WRT flash in the correct way so that everything gets wiped clean.

Thanks for your time!