For several years, I don't recall when I bought it but it was pre-2006, I've been using a Linksys wrt54g v3.1 with dd-wrt firmware with my broadband connections,and it has been rock solid. I picked up an Asus 520GU in an attempt to tether to a phone for a friend, I wasn't able to get that working, so it has been gather dust. For giggles last night I flashed it with the latest dd-wrt build,and swapped it for the wrt54g.

I've gone from 2700/700Kbps down/up to 8800/1200Kbps, a significant leap out of a $40 investment.

The speed tests were all performed within a short period of time on dslreports against the same server in NY, I'm in MA. However the same firmware build was not, the wrt54g was using a build from ~12 months ago, not sure if this is effect things.
Hardware wise the two routers are similar, both Broadcom based with the Asus using the slightly faster CPU wise 5354 and the Linksys the 4712.

While I'm enjoying the free speed increase, we ran into issues when streaming Netflix or Hulu to two TVs or computers, I'm left wondering if I can get any more, after all the cheapest FIOS is good for speeds of up to 15Mbs. Though I think this will require more the a $40 router.

I routinely get 8000kbit down using my WRT54GL on a "7Mbit" connection with Tomato firmware (it's at least 4 years old). And I've gotten much higher than that when I was using a faster internet connection.

You might want to try re-flashing your WRT to see if the speeds go up, but other than that, there does seem to be something wrong with it or its setup.

The WRT54Gs are lacking in CPU power so if you've got lots of features enabled then it will affect the throughput severely. I used a WRT54GS temporarily for my FTTC connection and turning off everything including the firewall increased the throughput. Depending on the model versions I believe the WRT54GS is faster than your WRT54G but I was able to get ~24Mbps through it.

Turn off as much as you can and see if it helps?

What is the WRT54G doing anyway? Do you have a router for the FiOS or is the WRT54G doing PPPoE? NAT?

I replaced it with a Mikrotik 450G which is doing PPPoE, routed IPv4, IPv4 NAT, IPv6 and SNMP. It doesn't go over 20% CPU usage ever.

Rumour has it that the Tomato firmware is slightly quicker than the DD-WRT firmware on a WRT54GL. Dunno if that's true or not.

But Tomato is supposedly good for up to about 25mbits/sec using PPPoE across the WAN link, so long as the firewall/QoS settings are not too onerous. At some point above that speed, it may become CPU-limited.

I have a collection of WRT54GL devices here, and all of mine happily overclock to 240Mhz (from the stock 200Mhz), which should raise that ceiling a bit. I do put heatsinks on them before overclocking though, out of paranoia. Others say that's not really necessary. YMMV.

Note that if overclocking fails on a WRT54xx router, it can be incredibly difficult to recover, because the boot-block sets the clock speed before the "failsafe download" stage.. and it all happens too quickly for a homebrew JTAG adapter to first gain control.

How do I know this? Heh.. heh.. a recent (mis-)adventure with my WRT54GS router: it didn't tolerate any amount of overclocking, and really wanted to become a brick.

So I had to open it up, and tie the highest address pin of the flash memory chip to +3.3V, so that the bootblock wouldn't be found/run at power-on, thereby allowing the JTAG adaptor to gain control. Then I snipped the pull-up wire (while still powered on), and used the JTAG to wipe the "nvram" parameter block from flash.

All in all, rather satisfying that this worked first try, with less than 10 minutes of effort!

Cheers

Trevor, the wrt54g is just doing DHCP to the FIOS router, no PPPoE etc. I don't recall futzing with the setting much, it just sits there are works, though apparently slower then it should.

I've slapped the current Tomato on to it, and will see if that makes a difference - must wait until SWMBO is finished watching TV before I swap routers.

edit: it is possible that my plan is not up to 15Mbps, as that is currently what Verizon is offering as their cheapest plan. It is possible I was not automatically upgraded at some point.

Double check the QoS (Quality of Service) settings -- I had mine off by a digit recently, and wondered why service was so (very consistently) slow..

Cheers

Too late to go back Mark, already flashed and tested. Either there was an issue with the firmware, or some setting I had made at some point, I did have QoS for VOIP, but I don't recall the settings.
Now getting 9300/1400 or so.

Googling around a bit I did find that Verizon did have a 10/2 plan (2008) and a 5/2 plan (2007). Given that they are advertising the 15/5 for what I am paying, I shall have to give them a call - I can always move to Comcast [shudder].

That was a nice Christmas present.

From the horror stories I've heard, keeping your slower speeds at the same price is better than moving to Comcast.

And many would say that a hole in the head would be preferable to having Comcast.
As I have the option, I am not below mentioning it, but I have relished my FiOS since it was install in April 2006 and I have no intent of dropping it.

I was happy at 2700Kbps, I'm sky high at 9000+Kbps.

I routinely max out my 20Mbps cable connection using a WRT54G (of some sort, poss GL) running Tomato. It does struggle with bittorrent, usually if I try and VNC over Hamachi when seeding, I should try and sort that in QoS one day.

Virgin have 100/10 in my area (over coax!) but it is £45/month so I am holding off at the moment, FTTC/VDSL will be availble in April and I would prefer that I think.

jealousy overload!!!!

I sometimes get 2Mb up and .5 Mb down...if I'm lucky. And I live 16 miles from the capital of Scotland!

Apparently my exchange has fibre, but no plans to roll it out my way - 2 miles south of the exchange :-(

I would get about 4Mb by ADSL here, I'm north of the airfield in Farnborough and the exchange is to the south - it's a long way around!

On your problem - do you know if you are on the 20CN or 21CN equipment at the exchange? Apparently the 21CN kit can help. I was with A&A at my parent's house and they are known to be good at getting the best from a line and if there are any problems, getting them fixed.

In fact I am just about to migrate my parents to some other ISP and move the A&A account to my house ready to dump Virgin when FTTC is installed.

Yup, the wrt4g is more then capable of handling the 10/2 FiOS that I get. I must have had something settings that were hamstringing it, as with a re-flash/upgrade and re-set it is giving close to max speed.

21CN exchanges have support for ADSL2+ which generally gives you an increase in throughput unless you've got really abysmal line stats. I was ~2Mbps on ADSL1 but went up to 3-4Mbps on ADSL2+. On FTTC I get ~27Mbps as I'm about 1km away from the cabinet. Its not quite the 40Mbps maximum that the current BT FTTC product gives you and its only just above what the maximum for ADSL2+ is but its still a very nice upgrade


The only thing extra they do for you is allow you to adjust the stability and interleave settings for your line. Apart from those settings, there isn't anything they can do in terms of "getting the best from a line" though.

I agree that they're very good at getting a line fixed though. BT have a habit of rejecting or just mysteriously closing trouble tickets so you need your ISP to be vigilient about actually getting BT to do something about it.

I used A&A for ADSL and now for FTTC with baby jumbo frames and native IPv6. No complaints at all about their service.

[vent]
All lucky. Only broadband I have available is Hughesnet (Satellite internet). I get abysmal speeds because they've overloaded SatMex6 (the satellite I'm aimed at). To add insult to injury, I get a whopping 500mb per/day download limit. If I exceed it, they effectively disable my internet for 24 hours unless I pay more to turn it back on early. And the kicker? $300 USD/mo for this service.

Talk about having us by the gonads...
[/vent]

How did you set that up with your Mikrotik? I've been meaning to have a go at it for a couple of weeks.

I needed to change 3 things to do baby jumbo for PPPoE

1. You may need to turn on LCPFix in the A&A configuration page for your line. I had trouble with it until I turned this on as it works around a BT bug where they don't correctly report your MTU to A&A. I've no idea what happens if you're not using A&A as you won't have this option but then again, they won't be using the same Firebrick router as A&A so it might be fine.

2. Set the MTU to be 1508 on the actual ethernet port that goes to the VDSL modem.

3. Set Max-MTU and Max-MRU to be 1500 on the PPPoE client configuration.

That is pretty much it. Bounced the line and A&A picked up the new MTU after a minute or so and its been working fine ever since. If you are using A&A then you should be able to see what MTU it thinks you are in the configuration page.

Yes, I'm with A&A. I'd already done steps 2 and 3. It's the LCP fix bit that I haven't tried. Will VPN in tonight and have a try.

BTW, where does it show your MTU on the config page? (I assume you mean the page on clueless?).

Never mind, just found it.

Yeah. Its the page on clueless that you're thinking of. Its the same place you set LCPFix. It is just above where the log at the bottom of the page is.

Start 26 Dec 13:42:22 Latest Today 16:00:00 Session 0000000000000000000000 a.gormless Login xxx@q.1 Bytes 493M/10.7G Pkts 4.61M/7.79M 26.0Mb/s mru1500

My line had LCPFix turned on already and I can't remember when or what turned it on. I had to configure another Mikrotik on FTTC for somebody else and it wouldn't work at all for 1500 MTU unless I turned on LCPFix. The Firebrick 6000 manual mentions about BT sometimes not sending the correct value and there being the LCPFix option to make it work properly.

You can see what BT is telling A&A in the RADIUS log page for your line on clueless.

Dec 26 13:42:23 newclueless radius-auth: BBEU00000000 BT Accept x.x.x.x x.x.x.x xxx@q.1 a.gormless LCP-restart Premium txrate=26000000bps linerate=30478000/1000 MTU=1492
Dec 26 13:42:31 newclueless radius-acct: BBEU00000000 Start xxx@q.1 x.x.x.x MRU=1500 linerate=26000000/1000 I/F=00:00:00:00:00:00:00:07

Peculiar, I ticked the box and bounced the router. But while MRU has now jumped to 1500, MTU is still at 1492.



Compared to one of my ordinary ADSL2+ lines using PPPoA



I can only bounce the router remotely, not the modem. Maybe that's why. I'm a little reluctant to hit the remote kill buttons on the A&A control page in case for some reason the line doesn't come back up again as I'm away until Sunday.

EDIT: On seeing your log files in the other post, I assume there's nothing to worry about. The only thing left on my to do list is make the iPhone PPTP VPN client connect over 3G, currently it only seems to work over wifi.

Yeah. Thats the bug. Just ignore it. I've tested it and it works fine with DF set and a 1500 packet.

Andy,

Not sure if you already know or not but if you want native IPv6 over PPPoE support then you have to use 5.0rc. It was an unsupported/undocumented feature in early versions of 4.x but they intentionally disabled it at some point to fix a bug. It got reenabled along with official support in 5.0 which is still in "release candidate" stage which seems to get a lot of new features...

I've been using 5.0rc for months now and I've not had any issues with it at all at least with the features I'm using.

I've got a block of ipv6 addresses from A&A which I intend to have a go with. Will check out v5 when I get home. I'd be very interested to see how easy it is to get it working. Although I'm not 100% sure how useful it's going to be in the short term.

As a side note, it appears upping the MTU has made my VPN over 3G issues disappear as well.

If your network isn't complicated then it is very easy to get going and it should just work when you plug in something which is IPv6 capable.

Assign 2001:8B0:XXX:1::1/124 to your PPPoE interface. You don't want EUI-64 and advertisements sent for this.
Assign 2001:8B0:XXX:1::/64 to your internal LAN interface or bridge. Turn on EUI-64 and advertisements for this.

Thats pretty much it to get IPv6 up and running. You'll probably want to add some firewall rules for IPv6 though. I can send you the configuration I'm using if you want to have a look at it.

IPv6 devices on your LAN should pick up the router and prefix by IPv6 neighbour discovery. If you want more control over it then you're going to have to implement DHCPv6 but generally IPv6 ND is enough and is all I run together with regular DHCP.


Currently the answer is not very useful. If you want the ability to directly access a specific machine within your internal LAN that doesn't have a public IPv4 address then its useful but relies on you also having IPv6 at the other end as well.


Yeah. Too many badly configured firewalls and routers out there completely block ICMP which screws up path MTU discovery so things get flakey if you're not using a MTU of 1500.

Apologies for not wrapping this up sooner....

Those instructions worked and now pretty much all the devices on my home network are now working dual stack. I've also set up tunnelled ipv6 on my VPS host so my web site and ssh access is now also available on ipv6, hopefully linode will start offering native ipv6 at some point.

Have you watched RevK's presentation on ipv6 over at Linx?

Nice. All ready then for World IPv6 day.

You shouldn't actually need to specifically set the IPv6 address on the PPPoE interface. I assigned it to the PPPoE interface as I wanted EUI-64 on my internal interfaces but I also wanted a short easy to remember IPv6 address on the router as well.

All you actually need to do for native IPv6 over PPPoE on a Mikrotik using AAISP is just assign the address for your LAN interface or bridge.


Careful about using dual stack on public servers though as the presentation mentions.


Yeah. Saw it before. Interesting presentation.

The server only has ssh and web ports open currently. So I'm not too concerned about it being any more open to abuse than it was before. Likewise at home I've just set the ipv6 firewall rules to default deny. I'll open it up as and when I need it.

This reminds me, the provider hosting this server recently turned on IPv6 in their datacenter. I can request an IP, should do so and add an AAAA record for the board.

Due to some changes A&A made this morning, you need to log into clueless and force the MTU to be 1500.