ASUS RT-N66U or TP-Link Archer C60 v2 shape 100/100mbit?

Hi all!

Want to use SQM at a 100/100 mbit internet connection. The router device will not have wifi enabled. May require 2 VLANs, but that should be it. No other requirements.

I have two different routers to install OpenWRT on:

  • Option #1: ASUS RT-N66U, Broadcom BCM4706 (600 MHz) / MIPS 74K
  • Option #2: TP-Link Archer C60 v2, Qualcomm Atheros QCA9561 (750 MHz) / MIPS 74Kc

This installation is at my parents house, hence stability is critical.

Are any of these routers capabable of shaping a 100/100 mbit connection?

If so, will openWRT/lede be sort of production grade for that router?

Thanks, Erik

Erik, "production grade" means many different things to different people.

Could be anything from "My family won't get too upset if it's down for under a couple hours" to "We rely on this link commercially and if it is down we will suffer tangible financial and repetitional losses." Would you clarify that a bit?

I haven't used the C60 personally, but its CPU seems comparable to the Archer C7s that I run here at home. Stability for the OpenWRT firmware on the ar71xx platform itself is very good. Some have suggested that the support for the ath10k wireless chips are somehow problematic; I have not seen any issues with the "stock" ath10k drivers (some have made loose suggestions that the Candella Tech "ct" drivers are "required"). Any "outages" for me are generally misconfiguration on my part, or the cat playing with the wires and yanking the power from the back of the device.

A 750-MHz MIPS processor should be able to handle 100 mbps with moderate-complexity shaping for home use. 100 mbps in both directions might be pushing it, if they're really pushing that much data upstream.

At 100 mbps, no wireless, and "production grade", personally I'd be looking at an ODROID (decent Ethernet, add one USB GigE adapter) or Raspberry Pi (slow Ethernet, add two USB GigE adapters), if not one of the x86 boards like the PC Engines ones I use, or look at the kinds that @dlakelan often links here.

Ah, here is a thread that may help on the shaping performance, as well as some other x86 options

Thank you! Jeff for your feedback!I actually have an odroid C2 + a 100mbit USB dongle laying around.

Would it be better to have the odroid´s native 1Gbit network interface towards internet (100mbit cap) or to local network?

BTW, tried googling for odroid and openwrt but couln´t find much of interest. Doesn´t seem to be a common solution.

Yeah, the ODROID units aren't terribly popular, but if you've got one it may be worth giving it a shot. Unless there's a zero missing, a "100mbit" adapter is likely to be a limiting factor, but should be enough to let you know if it is an approach you want to take before putting another US$14 into a GigE adapter.

Not knowing your level of comfort with Linux/networking, for a straight-up router running on comparatively unconstrained hardware, a lot of what OpenWRT offers over a readily available distro like Ubuntu or Debian comes down to LuCI and the ease of GUI setup for the most common topology. I've run CAKE and friends on other Linux-based distros, including on a C2 and an XU4.

CAKE and how to install it on a recent Linux system is described at https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/Cake/

It's pretty straightforward to do and it probably takes more time to read the page than it does to compile and install the kernel module and command-line utility.

The scripts to configure things are available at https://github.com/tohojo/sqm-scripts.