Archer C7 v4 and 1gbps connection

[tomasz]

Hi All,

I have recently moved to a place with 1gbps internet connection. My archer C7 v4 was not getting through 250mbps up and down. Today I discovered that I should use software offloading and it improved it to roughly 630 download 730 upload. In "top" I can see that CPU is not maxing out.
I also see that hardware offloading is compatible only with "mt7621", but I dont know what that is (some set of drivers?)
I also read about SQM (tried all possible configurations in it but it didnt improve anything)
I read also about fastpath, but not sure what that is and how to enable it..

Can someone please advice how to improve the performance? I know the link is capable of at least 900mbps both ways.

[Pico]

So you have 500Mbps-1Gbps fiber and need a router READ THIS FIRST

It's such a frequently asked question over the last few years that we really need a post we can point people to. So your cable company rolled out 500Mbps or 1Gbps download speeds, or you have 1Gbps symmetric fiber (GPON/EPON) from ATT or Centurylink or Orange or whoever. You realize your old all in one router from 2009 is not up to the task of handling this, but hey by now stuff should be cheap and available that will handle your new fiber connection right? So you want advice about a router for…

[tomasz]

Thanks, but thats not really what I've asked.
This router should be capable of handling such workload. Question is how to optimize it. I am mainly directing it to the users of the same router.

[slh]

@tomasz

This router should be capable of handling such workload.

It's not, far from it.

We are talking about a single core mips 74Kc (QCA9563) CPU, clocked at 750 MHz - which is far below the requirements for routing 1 GBit/s at wirespeed.

[tomasz]

according to tp-link it is
https://www.tp-link.com/en/home-networking/wifi-router/archer-c7/#overview

"Simultaneous 2.4GHz 450 Mbps and 5GHz 1300 Mbps connections for 1.75Gbps of total available bandwidth"

I guess I will try to flash it to manufacturer firmware over the weekend and see how it goes

[jrambo99]

What you're quoting there is marketing about the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios' maximum theoretical performance. Real world wireless performance is lower than that.

You're not handling a 1 gbps connection on the C7 running third party firmware. You can overclock the v4 to ~1GHz to get some more speed, but it's still not going to be enough. Software flow offloading helps as you've already tried, but not enough either. It's simply too underpowered for these kind of connections. (QCA9563, the SoC this router uses, was released on 2013-2014, it's old)

If you go back to TPLink's firmware, you'll be able to use the included hardware NAT offloading that's not available anywhere else (as that's proprietary stuff that Qualcomm doesn't share) and get closer to where you want to be on WAN <=> LAN throughput, but then you lose all the flexibility you gan get with openwrt (or ddwrt or whatever firmware you can think of flashing). If TPLink's firmware features are good enough for you, go ahead.

The C7 makes for a good AP if used with something else with actual CPU power to properly handle faster connections (x86 or a SBC like the Raspberry Pi 4)

[frollic]

As already stated, it's the theoretical max speed of the wifi, which has zero relation to the routing capability of the unit.

Some brands even sell 1+ gbit wifi devices, equipped with 100mbit ethernet ports.