Joined: 11 Apr 2010 Posts: 311 Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posted: Mon May 11, 2020 22:25 Post subject: What are the fastest Broadcom-based Netgear Routers?
AT&T has started offering 1Gbit symmetrical fiber to the home in my area (not available for me as yet) and I was wondering what are the fastest Broadcom-based Netgear routers that support DD-WRT?
I like Netgear routers because they have been stable for me in over ten R7000 deployments and they are easy to flash and unbrick if you work directly with the serial port pins on the motherboard. However, the Netgear R7000 is only able to support around 450Mbits and will not support 1Gb because there is no driver support for hardware NAT. I like Broadcom because I like to do VLAN hacking and Broadcom-based routers are the only ones that support it.
Is the Netgear 8500 at 1.7Ghz the fastest Broadcom-based Netgear router available that still supports DD-WRT?
Joined: 08 May 2018 Posts: 14222 Location: Texas, USA
Posted: Mon May 11, 2020 22:59 Post subject: Re: What are the fastest Broadcom-based Netgear Routers?
mache wrote:
I like Broadcom because I like to do VLAN hacking and Broadcom-based routers are the only ones that support it.
Really? R7800, EA8500 also support it. Only Atheros device (Alpine CPU) that is tricky and doesn't readily support VLAN tinkering is the R9000. It's just not as "easy" as Broadcom, I guess.
mache wrote:
Is the Netgear 8500 at 1.7Ghz the fastest Broadcom-based Netgear router available that still supports DD-WRT?
1. Only Broadcom based devices support port-based VLAN's, no Atheros or Ralink devices. Non-Broadcom platforms support 802.1q VLAN tagging via the Networking page options (Linux's vconfig utility is used internally for this) but it often does not work correctly and it is for tagging entire interfaces (the LAN ports are all one interface on these platforms).
2. Only LAN ports can do VLAN's on devices with BCM4704 CPU due to the WAN port having a separate MII (connection to the CPU). See the discussion in this thread.
3. Any other devices that don't create vlan# interfaces by default.
4. If vlan# interfaces are created then they likely can be reconfigured and tagged using nvram settings as explained on the Switched Ports page because the VLAN GUI is unreliable on modern devices.
Joined: 11 Apr 2010 Posts: 311 Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posted: Mon May 11, 2020 23:43 Post subject:
Thats great. I always thought the web config a bit redundant and flaky. If I can do the typical command line configs than I am all in for the faster Atheros processors to keep up with Gbit WAN NAT.
