Even using Ethernet and open source firmware on consumer routers (e.g., TomatoUSB on Broadcom-based ASUS), I wasn't able to get >100 Mbps. I guess many developers' own Internet connections don't have such bandwidth, so they're not incentivized to make improvements.

Google provided both modems and routers, which was absolutely essential. Very few people had/have the hardware to take advantage of the fiber speed.

Anyone who wants to roll out a fast service should certainly take that cue.

Anyone looking to roll out fast service should try to get Google to sell them the routers, because Google actually bothered to do the routers and modems right in ways that almost no retail modems and routers do, and few ISPs would be able to even develop detailed product requirements for.

You should check out the Edge Router series from Ubiquity. They are cheap ($50-$350) and can route traffic at gigabit speeds.

Here is the Edge Router Lite http://amzn.to/1UhB9SF

It's not a 'lazy developer' issue, but hardware really is the limiting factor. You would be surprised how much a router can impact your speed once you get above 50Mbps.

Another brand to recommend is MikroTik. Depending on your needs they have routers that can scale from small home use to medium - large office.

Yeah, you have to do a bit of research to find routers that can route/firewall at ~1Gbps. The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite is one such router, with a typical retail price of just south of 100 USD. (Though -for whatever reason- you do have to manually enable hardware offload to get 1Gbps perf out of the device.)

Here is the system I purchased - http://www.pcengines.ch/apu1d4.htm

With both OpenBSD and Debian, I've had no problems routing at gigabit speed locally and the maximum 350 Mbps on WAN.

That looks pretty neat. Can you route and firewall at gigabit rates?

Also, it looks like it would cost ~150->300 USD to make a complete (board, case, storage, AC adaptor) router?

That's right about the cost. I think it's a good deal compared to something like https://store.pfsense.org/SG-2440/

What do you mean by firewall, exactly? I do nothing extreme, just an pf or iptables ruleset, run dnsmasq, privoxy - those sorts of things. Glad to take some performance benchmarks you can recommend.

> What do you mean by firewall, exactly?

The basic stuff: NAT translation, port forwarding, connection rejection and the like.

For bonus points, doing stuff like traffic shaping/prioritizing (like CoDel) at gigabit speed would be rather interesting.

At the moment the EdgeRouter Lite can do limited amounts of packet inspection using the offload hardware. As time goes on the Ubiquiti folks figure out how to better use the offload chip, but -for now- rate limiting and traffic shaping has to run through the thing's CPU, which -IIRC- gives you somewhere north of 100mbit/s of throughput.

> I think it's a good deal compared to something like...

Oh, for something that I would expect to be able to keep using for 10 years, I think it's quite a reasonable price. :D

Edit: Yeah, I don't really have any perf benchmarks to recommend. I guess -if I had the time and the gumption- I'd do something like set up iperf (probably 3 so you can use TCP) on two machines (each in a different subnet so packets would pass through the router) and adjust the iperf listen port so that my various firewall rules triggered, and compare performance.

Using open-source firmware won't get you much in the way of performance benefits if it's not using recent Linux kernels and well-maintained in-tree drivers.

And it was only recently that any routers started including CPUs that are powerful enough for high-speed packet processing. Prior to 802.11ac, basically everything was based off '90s-era single-core MIPS and the only hope of 100+Mbps throughput was to use hardware offloads that severely curtail the kinds of packet processing you can accomplish (and usually isn't supported by any open-source driver). Now we've got 1+GHz multi-core ARM processors in wireless router SoCs, but no mature drivers for them.

My mid-range router simply didn't have a fast enough processor to handle Gigabit speeds, I ended up upgrading shortly after having the service installed in my apartment to a much nicer device. It was well worth it.

For me, it's less about the throughput than the total experience given the services I use.

I have a less than stellar connection for the US (~25/5-ish?), and getting my voip to work took some real tuning in PFsense. The move to PFsense was basically motivated by the fact that I couldn't even do the things I wanted to prioritize voip via the gui provided by the mainstream combo wifi/router I had before. Without tuning (firewall, qos settings), it would frequently sound terrible as soon as someone fired up something bandwidth intensive.

I wonder how much is HW vs. SW, since the router I'm using these days is a low-end single core (2x hyper thread) atom box from Soekris that rarely has >10% cpu load. There appear to be much faster HW options available from various vendors these days at a lower price point than I paid for the soekris when it was new, but PFsense wasn't available on my cheap MIPS wifi-router.