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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what kind of router they put in at the home. I doubt your standard Linksys WiFi router will be able to cope at that speed.

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http://routerboard.com/RB750GL current retail is $59.95, I am sure they would make Google a deal ...

Actually there are many single-chip, 4x Gigabit ethernet solutions on the market. These do wire-speed gbit "in hardware" as it were.

According to the very page you linked its maximum routing throughput is 631 Mbps which is respectable but hardly wire-speed.

Indeed. I have a Soekris router with a gigabit card, but the best it can do is around 400Mbps. Packet filtering and NAT require some computation, and 1Gbps is a lot of data.

Then again, I can actually use Bittorrent without having to reboot the router :)

Specifically, here's a list of home routers sorted by performance: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/router-charts/view Looks like there are only about 20 routers that can handle 150 Mbps or more.

I can't tell from that chart.. is that Megabits per second or Megabytes?

Megabits

Dual-band, double-width-channel 11n might be able to do that speed. But even if not, the gigabit wired ports ought to be able to.

Some routers' CPUs simply aren't fast enough to forward traffic from the WAN to the LAN. Before I replaced my router with a higher-end model, my 50mbit/s cable connection ran at 30. Now it peaks at 60.

Any gigabit router should be able to handle that, even Linksys.

It's not enough that they 'support' gigabit ethernet; most cheap routers will fall over long before they hit that speed.

Right... especially on the WAN port. Most cheap routers aren't expecting to have to route gigabit traffic, hence the initial question.

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