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Hi CA3LE, thanks very much for your prompt response that clears up what was a mystery to me (should've figured it out for myself, duh!)...and for all you & your fine website does for us! I'll try to keep this brief. The reason that our (ViaSat/WildBlue/Exede) speeds have increased is that the kids are heading back to school; thus resulting in less traffic on our domain(s) and across the Internet in general. This is the explanation that's been provided us by our ISP during previous summers...that when the kids are out of school playing online games, streaming videos/music, our performance is degraded. Even though our performance was increased dramatically in May when we were cut over to Exede from the old WildBlue, we knew that once school was out we'd see a drop in performance..though not as significant as in past years. But now they're heading back to school, performance is back up. OK, I'm just rattling on here, enough of that! Thanks again for your courtesy, patience, technical knowledge and professionalism. Proud to be a member of this forum and yours is the ONLY "Performance Testing" website that I'll use or recommend to others! Have a great day, very best regards to you & all the fine folks there at TestMY! jerry in TX.

This stack works for me!

These issues are precisely why my opinion is this, no need for the best router, so long as what your trying to do matches what available bandwidth you got to work with. I grabbed an old netgear WNR834b v.2 from a swap I did, flashed it with ddwrt, opened everything up, set access via mac ,WPA-AES and toasted the DHCP server. Plug it up to an old managed 2924 XL-EN only allowing the static IP's managed by pfsense on a separate machine through the port, tri gigabit nics , and get the NAT going with snort, a few blocklists and presto, cheap awesome trouble free ( for the most part lol ) I've got an old wrt54g v.8 flashed w/ ddwrt for when they come in trying to use the handhelds, where otherwise nothing gets in on the wireless. Although I think it's rendered it's final byte, have to look at it when I have some time. I think I have 50 bucks in the entire ( listed ) network. With 60/3 connection , rarely an issue, local streaming isnt an issue either, were not watching more then one HD movie at a time, and if we were it could easily handle it.

True, considering most home routers are already subject to ISP QoS policies at the edge and the home routers already have too much other nonsense running on them to bog them down. Not much you can do when your router's just going to queue up data at the WAN as far as downstream QoS/Traffic Shaping goes. Upstream QoS unless you have FiOS or another symmetrical fiber plan is almost a definite must though. Any router that was built to do QoS in the hardware itself (which is significantly faster and does not tear at the CPU as much) would be suggested for QoS in the home. My router at home is a few years old, but it has a 532Mhz CPU from Intel that is ARM-based. It's 32-bit, not exactly 64-bit or Dual core like the newer generations of the router I have but the thing is a powerhouse. It's WAN <> LAN Throughput exceeds 100Mbps and that's with QoS services enabled. I don't run anything such as a Samba share or a Print server off of it which cuts down on all the rediculousness, but it is quite a workhorse. CPU load hardly has to work. Time: 06:58:15 up 284 days, 8:22, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

QoS being enabled on a router is a good way to overload the CPU on the router itself its usually a good idea to leave it disabled, in most home uses it won't serve a real purpose anyway ~ Mark

I know with the ASUS routers and even D-Links there are these fancy Automatic QoS settings that are sometimes enabled by default. I would definitely try disabling any QoS setting in the router that relates to the WAN connection. Wireless QoS such as WMM can remain on and must be on for Wireless N devices. Also, some newer cable modems are coming with firewalls built-in to them. If your provider uses Ubee or Motorola Gateways for example, I find the firewall in the modem is often to blame for poor speeds, and these often include settings under the guise of "IP Flood Detection" or another term. Shutting that off entirely and bridging the modem too helps. But definitely, rule out all QoS/GameBooster settings and also rule out any hardware-based firewalls. If you're still seeing issues, definitely check your cable signal levels too. You may be erroring out just enough to kill speeds but not enough to kill the connection entirely. That stuff isn't just with DSL and Fiber

Not sure how much knowledge I'll be able to share. I am just learning about the vista stacks and what does what. If I stumble upon something i'll make sure to share though...lol