By the way, on the question with old routers, there is something that most people won't be aware of.
The older routers tend to have very small state tables. With today's internet practices and having a higher probability of higher prices logged on, those state tables may easily fill up. When they do, it's going to be slow.
Last year, I had a customer who had serious problems with their interet even though speed tests came out quite good. I started looking at their router.
One problem is that their router had to have a number of ports forwarded and I didn't have their password and the company who had it couldn't find it.
I finally went out there one day and installed a Ubiquiti router as a test.
I was using a flood ping from a unix box for the test. What that does is send out pings without waiting for a ping to return before sending the next. You tell it how many you want and it sends out pings until it gets that many back and tells you the result.
The following data comes from my report on the test.
The first set of pings were bypassing the router to a local address, 10.100.0.1. With
ping -f -c 7500 10.100.0.1
(different values for 7500)
1) transmitted: 7561, received: 7500
2) transmitted 1000, received 1000
3) transmitted 1002, received 1000
So far so good.
I then went through the router to our gateway
4) transmitted: 3101, received: 75
5) transmitted: 3081, received: 75
6) transmitted: 3076, received: 75
7) transmitted: 7, received: 7
8) transmitted: 10, received: 10
9) transmitted: 20, received: 20
10) transmitted: 3043, received: 30
11) transmitted: 33, received: 30
12) transmitted: 31, received: 30
13) transmitted: 43, received: 40
14) transmitted: 3100, received: 50
As you can see, at test 10, just trying to get 30 ping replies during a flood ping, it took 3043 pings. That test was done before lunchtime. The next batch, tests 11-14, were done during lunch time when they were a tad less busy and then it crapped out trying to get 50 replies.
I called the other company up and they located the password for me. I replaced the old router with the Ubiquiti. After that, I ran tests of up to at leat 20,000 pings without a problem. I never have tested it far enough to figure out where it fails.
So if you have an old router and it just doesn't seem to pull everything in, it might be this same problem. The router isn't broken, it's working exactly as intended, but that is for a period of time in which the demands on a router were much less.
Right now, we're using Ubiquiti Routers. We charge $55 for a regular router and $85 for a high powered router. The high powered router runs about the same power levels as the outside routers. We could sell them for more, but I like everyone to have routers that we can support.
For the company that had the problem, if that router quits, they can call me up and I should be there with a new router completely configured within an hour.
I haven't tried any flood pings through my Ford access point/router yet to see if it bogs down at some point. I suspect that it has plenty of space for the state tables.
