GS308EP - Can it handle gigabit fiber well? Or is there a better choice? Slow gig internet!!!
So, we just finally got fiber. Been using 4G cellular for a year. So, fiber is so much nicer, but still lackluster so far. When they installed the fiber, they installed this tiny fiber modem on the wall where the fiber goes directly to and then out of that is a CAT 6 from the fiber modem to the router. Now, when they installed it, they gave me some cheap router. I got rid of that almost immediately. I thought I had a pretty nice setup and wanted to keep using it.
Out of the fiber modem, it runs into a Watchguard T20 firewall that I'm using as a router/firewall. From there, it runs out the lan port to the netgear switch. Out of the switch, I have it running to a Cisco 150ax access point. It is an access point only. No routing at all. No double nats. I hate double nats. The access point is 802.11ax wifi 6. I then have I think 4 range extenders around the house. I also have a CAT 6 running from the netgear switch running out to my garage to another two netgear switches and a cisco 150ax access point.
After hooking this up, the internet seems laggy. I have many terabytes of home videos and pictures. We have fiber finally so I'm trying to get rid of my home nas and I'm uploading everything to google drive. My desktop is using wireless. I'm only getting about 150 Mb/s upload speed. But, as I'm getting 150 Mb/s upload speed and it's working for quite a while, we stream our TV.... the TV is buffering. This is upload. I'm supposed to have a gig up and down full duplex.
I was chatting on a different forum about this. I don't know a ton of how wireless works. Basically someone stated on that forum that wireless works half duplex and works like a hub so, if one device is using a lot of bandwidth, nothing else will work well until that one finishes.
But, a few days ago, I was trying to find the bottleneck of the bandwidth. I hooked direcly up to the fiber modem and ran a speed test and confirmed I am truly getting 1 Gb/s up and down. So, it's not my ISP. It's my setup. I shouldve tried on the lan port of the watchguard... didn't. Maybe try that soon. But, after I got that 1 Gb/s test good, I hooked the switch up and then tested from a switch port on the Netgear gs308ep switch and my speed dropped drastically. I was getting about 250 Mb/s up and down. I then tested on wireless and got about 80 Mbs/s up and down.
All is drastically better than 4G. But, it would be nice if I needed to use a lot of data on my desktop (which I do frequently), that it wouldn't cause the TV media streaming to buffer when I have gigabit full duplex.
(15 years ago, I was an IT admin at a school. It was way out in the boonies. It has 6 Mb/s internet that came into the MDF over microwave wireless. We had hundreds of PCs, labs of PCs and I made it work. Granted one kid in a lab playing a youtube video would slow everyone down. But, that was 6 Mb/s for 5 buildings of PCs. They did get upgraded over the years and, when I left in 2014, they had fiber but it was only 50 Mb/s still.) I now have 1 Gb/s for my house...)
Out of the fiber modem, it runs into a Watchguard T20 firewall that I'm using as a router/firewall. From there, it runs out the lan port to the netgear switch. Out of the switch, I have it running to a Cisco 150ax access point. It is an access point only. No routing at all. No double nats. I hate double nats. The access point is 802.11ax wifi 6. I then have I think 4 range extenders around the house. I also have a CAT 6 running from the netgear switch running out to my garage to another two netgear switches and a cisco 150ax access point.
Yes, you can connect the T20 WAN/Internet port direct to the fiber box. Best guess, there is not just the fiber (which does the link form the ISP to the fiber box), but also a Gigabit copper Ethernet port for this purpose.
Avoid wildly mixing up WAN (with the publilc IP subnet) with the rest of the LAN. The only connection is the T20 which should be configured as the one-and-only NAT router, and having the RFC1918 private LAN IP on it's LAN side. From there you can connect to the switch, to the wireless AP, to a NAS, ... whatever.
In plain Firewall NAT routing, the T20 should be able to handle about 510 Mbit/s on mixed traffic, or up to 1.7 Gbit/s on UDP (more a theoretical value). The performance of the T20 will be much lower on operating VPN (something around 400 Mbit/s max), HTTPS with IPS enabled, or when you consider to keep up the Antivirus inspection on the T20.
Range extenders? Wireless range extenders? When it comes to performance this reads fishy at least. Tell us more if you want an estimate on the performance loss ...
There is goes your wonderful Gigabit fiber performance my friend.
It's certainly not the GS308EP, which does handle wire speed switching with ease.
