Performance & Use-ability

General Browsing

Ok, so you think you can browse fast on broadband. Well one of the things that has struck me about this router lark in the past, is that general browsing can only be slower. Not by much I grant you, say 2-3ms depending on cpu load, however you are defiantly limited then by the fact that you have one line to browse with. Well this is where the double connection is so good, if one line was slow, I would click on the link again, or even better, open another window and thus session and I would be swapped over to the second connection. How hard is it to hit shift when browsing? You cannot really quantify browsing speed until you have actually gone from 56k to broadband. This isnt in the same realms of increase, yet it is defiantly noticeable.

DownloadsWith the way the net works, the only way you can truly use two connections with these dual WAN routers at the moment is to open up two sessions. Many download sites make an effort to stop file leeching so trying to open up two sessions and combine them (like the better download accelerator programs) will simply not work. So the download you start from guru3d.com will be made on only one of these ports at any one time. If you have two connections of varying speed, then you might get connected on the slower one.

To maximise download speeds, you must be aware of how these routers work, and thus know that you must use a download accelerator program to do this. Something I am sure will be sorted in the future, but only once the price of ram drops a lot more, and the functionality of some of these chips increases.

All that said, I have collated some results from our internal network. Reasons for staying internal is that if I went external I would still be using the same line from my work. And I would be slapped with a trout for downloading 100Mb files for no use other than to test a router.
This way I can show you the maximum upload and download rates from the 10Mbit WAN ports.

These results show the small variations in speed and also the average over the same 20 random time intervals while downloading from the servers in the server room. Notice that the combined download rate is approx 2 x the average readings here. All you can see is that the router is doing its job by spliting the two sessions i had opened (to download the files from the main server) over both WAN ports.