Hi everyone,
I’m relatively new to routeros but have been using linux for firewalls for about the last 15 years with various configurations so know my way around networking, but i’m stumped by a probem with my broadband connection. I have an RB2011 router and a bt infinity connection (UK fttc broadband).
The setup is as follows:
broadband line comes into house and connects to supplied vdsl modem
vdsl modem is connected to routerboard using an ethernet cable (winbox says the connection is 1Gb)
eth1 is used as a wan port
eth2,3 and 6 are configured in a bridge and connect the lan (2,3 at 1Gb and 6 at 100Mb) this works fine
pppoe client configured with correct username using wan port (eth1) this connects fine[/list]
When I test the connection using speedtest.net I get 8Mb down and 8Mb up which is much slower than I should be getting
If I disable pppoe, connect the wan port to the bt supplied router, the bt router to the vdsl modem and connect with a dhcp client I get between 15Mb and 60Mb down and upto 15Mb up.
Is there a problem with routeros handling the pppoe connection. MTU and MRU set to max 1500 and MTU appears top get negotiated to 1492 and MRU 1500. Because both down and up are running at 8Mb i’m wondering if there’s a problem with the routerboard handling the pppoe connection, except the cpu load doesn’t go over 25% while testing it.
and I would bet on if you stitch the modem directly in the LAN port of the PC you can get nearly 80% of the whole
bt Internet connection!
But the router from bt is only doing in normal cases SPI/NAT and thats it then so I would imagine that you are then lossing perhaps 1 - 5% of the whole throughput of total.
The RouterBoard is giving you also the option to set up your own firewall and mangle rules and also queues, but this is also “eating” even some bandwidth from your line!
But if you are doing some “miss configuration” you will loose more then perhaps 20% of the total bandwidth!
Another circumstance is also often, that peoples are using the router given by their ISPs and with an integrated modem, put them only in front of their RouterBoards!! But this is then a double SPI/NAT situation and this will also narrow down the
throughout immense or massively.
I personally think it should be anything with your setup, because the RB2011 are sorted with a really powerful cpu and
enough memory to blast away the most routers given by the telecommunication companies! Same here in Germany
from where I drop you this lines, in usual cases the most peoples, so perhaps 30 - 40% are connected to the Internet using a router from the company called AVM , but we were testing this one against a RB2011UAS-2HnD-IN from MikroTik
on a VDSL 50MBit/s link and the RB2011 was clearly the winner!! So I personally think it is something owed to your setup.
Thanks Dobby, I thought it was unlikely that the routerboard would be underpowed but I was worried about some inefficiency in the PPPoE stack. The UK ISPs all want people to use their own routers so they can setup national wifi networks and generally control how people use the internet at home. I will try again and I think the real issue is to do with the MTU being detected by the routerboard being too high, i.e. path MTU discovery being blocked somehow. The MTU gets automatically detected at 1492 but if I send pings of that size I get fragmentation, I have to go to 1464 (from memory) before I stop seeing fragmentation on pings. I’ll update later with what happens.
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I found the problem. I had connected port 1 to the modem which is a 1Gb port on the routerboard. It was auto negotiating to 10Mb though. I tried turning off auto negotiation which didn’t work at all, changed over all the cables just in case and tried a different 1Gb port as well but it kept auto negotiating to 10Mb. I changed to a 100Mb port and reconnected and I now get similar speeds to using the ISPs router so its effectively fixed, but I have no idea why auto negotiating is failing. The max speed of the connection is 72Mb so not a problem but I may try it again with a 1Gb switch connected in between to see what happens.
To recap on my setup (as I couldn’t find any other instructions on setting up BT infinity with a routerboard
connect a 100Mb port directly to the supplied modem
create a pppoe-client using the connected port (e6 in my case), username bthomehub@btbroadband.com and blank password. Leave everything else as defaults
In IP>firewall change any rules referring to e1-*-gateway to refer to the pppoe interface and also change the masquerade rule to refer to the same interface.
to use their own routers so they can setup national wifi networks and generally control how people use the internet at home.
Not really. if they want they can do even time, but they are able cutting the amount of employees in the support division
because they must only be familiar with one or two router models!!!
connection is 72Mb so not a problem
Fine to hear from yours, this is purely a very different throughput and each far away from 8 MBit/s.
And pointed back to the hardware, the RB2011, don´t worry about this is one of the most powerful RBs MikroTik is selling
compared to the price!!
Yes much better. I found a post from someone with a similar auto negotiation problem with the same modem http://huaweihg612hacking.wordpress.com/about/ in the comments. I expect there is some incompatibility in either the routerboard or the vdsl modem but can’t work out what exactly. I have seen plenty of posts about consumer grade equipment being connected though (I expect most manufacturers would have tested and updated firmware for this particular modem though) so not sure what the problem is with the RB2011. If anyone from mikrotik wants to investigate I can send over details of my setup (as long as I get instructions).
p
I have the exact same problem and I have posted a thread here (before I found this thread).
I can confirm placing a 10/100 switch between the BT modem and the RB solves the issue but it shouldn’t be required. I would like an official response from Mikrotik. I am willing to provide whatever diagnostic info it takes to solve the issue. As an IT consultancy we have a lot of FTTC customers coming online and if Mikrotik can’t solve the issue we might as well stop using them. This is disappointing because I invested a lot of time learning about them and placed my trust in these devices. Now the boss is skeptical about my suggestion of using Mikrotik and their reliability. It looks bad on me and Mikrotik… I guess now is the time to prove you listen and respond to people’s concerns within a reasonable time frame. I have email support regarding this issue. The boss doesn’t wait around.
You wont normally get an official responce from Mikrotik in these forums as they are user forums - may be work emailing support@mikrotik.com if you beleive the error is with the Mikrotik (highly probable!)
We have seen this issue with several customers. It is an issue related to Gigabit autonegotiation on the 2011.
We solved it in the short term, by using port 10, and it connects at 100 Mbps full duplex
We have raised a ticket with mikrotik in conjunction with one of our customers, and have supplied supout etc in different configurations, and using both common BT supplied FTTC VDSL modems.
In the short term we recommend using port 10 for the FTTC connection
(you wouldn’t really want to tie up a gigabit socket for an 80 Mbps connection anyway…)
The auto-neg on the 1 Gb ports is handled by the Atheros 8327 which is also used in some other products including some TP-Link units. It would be interesting to know if a given VDSL device works OK with a non-Mikrotik 8327 port but ends up at 10Mb on the 2011.
I’m having the same problem here with a 951G 2HnD. It only has Gigabit ports so no chance of swapping the a 100 port. Disable auto-negotiate and forcing a 100 connection downs the port.
It’s whatever the latest BT Infinity VDSL modem is. I attempted to get it off the wall last night to get the model number but the BT engineer has done a proper job of attaching it.
It appears I have the ECI variant. I’m not looking to hijack this thread and am quite happy to open another. Although I suspect we are probably all suffering from the same issue.