I am a novice and understand that there is more power here than I need, but I have what seems like a problem with the basic, default setup that I am hopeful someone can help with. In a nutshell, when used as a router rather than a bridge, my Mikrotik 2011 drops my download speed from roughly 300mbps to 160mbps.
I have Comcast and have their modem/router, an Arris Model TG1682G. I would prefer to use my Mikrotik 2011 as the router in my system and I am able to switch between bridge mode on the two devices so that I can set either the Arris as a bridge and route with the Mikrotik or the Arris as the router and Mikrotik as a bridge. Both setups allow my computer and other devices to connect to the internet (the other links in the chain are a netgear switch and a Unifi AP) without any issue. I have factory reset the Mikrotik recently to make sure I was starting fresh, so there are no custom settings in place to worry about. I have new, cat6 cables for all connections, and I have used ether1 for my WAN connection and ether2 or ether4 for my LAN connection to confirm that it is not just which connection I am using that is causing the issue. I saw a reference to an issue with the LCD on the Mikrotik in a forum and have turned that off and that did not improve my speeds.
Any thoughts or guidance would be much appreciated, particularly if such guidance assumes that I am low on the IT learning curve.
Setting the cable modem to bridge mode and using your MIkroTik as a router seems straightforward to me. Most people should be doing this.
Using your cable modem as a router and the MikroTik as a “bridge” is less clear.
Are you really only using the MikroTik as a dumb switch with no IP configuration? Or are you really using it as a 2nd router underneath your cable modem router? Or maybe you’re just using the MikroTik as a wireless access point?
Acruhl, thanks for posting. I won’t ultimately use the mikrotik in bridge mode going forward under any circumstance (if the arris is my router i will just use the netgear switch). I only recently got the netgear switch and before i had that i was using the mikrotik as a passive switch because the arris did not have enough ports (and i hadn’t had the time after getting the arris modem to change the configuration to the one we both agree makes the most sense, arris in bridge and mikrotik as router).
I am torn at this juncture though. I want to use the mikrotik as router, but i am loathe to give up more than a 100mbps to get the power and flexibility that comes with that change in the tests i have run so far. Any thoughts you have on why switching from bridge to router mode in these circumstances would slow my test results so much would be greatly appreciated.
I have this feeling that these “all in one” cable modem devices, especially ones provided by ISPs, are shady. They will do stuff like this so they don’t have to field calls about custom setups.
My advice - buy a regular cable modem and try again.
Also, you could try another brand of router in with your modem in bridge mode to rule out a MikroTik problem
Acruhl, thanks for the good suggestions. I have an old D-Link router so I will test that now and see if that indicates a modem throttling issue or a mikrotik issue.
First of all, you didn’t specify which version of the RB2011 you have, but …
A RB2011UiAS should be able of about 350 Mbit/s with full routing/firewall etc. With enabled fast-path (https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Fast_Path) even more, but that has impact on some firewall rules etc.
You also didn’t specify, which version of RouterOS your’e using. There are vast difference in switch/bridge configuration before 6.41 and after. Did you configure the ports on the RB2011 as bridge ? or switch ?
You also have to understand, that your first switch-group (The SFP port + the 5 Gbit/s ports) only have 1 Gbit/s total bandwidth to the routers CPU. So depending on how much traffic you send through the CPU. This means, that if you have it configured as bridge (pre 6.41 that means no hardware offload at all), then it’s all CPU traffic. And don’t get me wrong. I’d stick with 6.40.5 for now, but configure the ports as switch (so, one port to the cable, router, one master-port, the others as slave to the master port).
Also .. how did you test the throughput ? Obviously it has to be a comparable test between your cable-router and with the RB2011.
