[AusNOG] Cisco routers on NBN 100/40Mbps connection

[Tim Sheahan]

Well said Reuben,

I've used Cisco routers on my home network before. Having now had 
exposure to MikroTik, I'm considering going that path the next time 
around, for cheaper throughput along with a (hopefully) sufficient 
feature set.

  - Tim Sheahan

On 10/08/2014 11:11 AM, Reuben Farrelly wrote:
> On 10/08/2014 10:53 AM, James Jazza wrote:
>> Hi Guys,
>>
>> We are hearing reports that Cisco 881 routers are not suitable for NBN
>> 100/40Mbps connections, and that we need to use the next model up - a
>> Cisco 1841 instead.
>
> The 1841s are approaching end of life.  You will want to look at a 
> 1921 or 1941 for this or even higher, depending on what features you 
> want to enable.  Not only because of the throughput increase that 
> you'll need, but it doesn't make much sense to deploy 10 year old 
> hardware on a new link..
>
>> Can anyone comment on this? As the Cisco 881 has 100Mbps internal ports,
>> so I would have thought it would be ok.
>
> A 100M port line rate does not indicate, or even suggest, 100M of 
> routing throughput.
>
> Generally speaking on a L2/L3 switching platform you will get line 
> rate between switched ports, as the switching is done in hardware.
>
> But on a router where you're doing routing on a software based 
> platform where the CPU is heavily involved in packet forwarding, the 
> forwarding numbers are almost always much much lower than port line rate.
>
> The 881/1800/1900/2900/3900s are for the most part software based 
> routers where the limiting factor in terms of throughput is the CPU 
> speed and utilisation.
>
> This document is very out of date (last update November 2009) but it's 
> a good relative comparison between platforms, as to what you may be 
> able to get:
>
> http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/downloads/765/tools/quickreference/routerperformance.pdf 
>
>
> Reuben
>
>
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