Mikrotik RBM33G vs EdgeRouter PoE 5, and multiple fibre speed. What to chose?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hi everyone,
My ISP offers multiple fibre speeds, the two most relevant ones being 200M/200M and 1G/1G (i'm currently on a 800M/800M contract).

I also have two routers at hand, the one i'm currently using, a Mikrotik RBM33G running OpenWrt 19.07.3 and a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter PoE-5, running EdgeOS (haven't powered it up in about 18 months, not sure what version).

Question 1: is there any point getting more than 200/200 with any of these two routers?
The EdgeRouter 5 is supposed to do handle gigabit connections, but that's using proprietary offloading and i'm not a fan of the whole Ubiquiti ecosystem (hence my being here and using OpenWrt).
The RBM33G should also handle a gig, if i'm reading the specs correctly.
However, a basic curl download test shows download speeds capping at 20 MB/s (so 160 mbps, a far cry from a gig or the 800M my ISP offers).

Question 2: if both can support this, which one should i use? Considering i'd rather stick to OpenWrt than get crazy speeds (it's a home connection after all)

Lastly, there's also a Linksys Velop that came with my ISP's package, but it's currently relegated to being a simple AP, in bridging mode (and it's quite limited at that, no VLAN support), and i have two old Ubiquiti APs lying around (a terrible UAC-pro, the square ones that one on the market for too long, and a UAP-LR, that can't do Wifi AC).

Thanks a lot for any and all advice!

2

The MT7621 chip is a good match for 200 Mb ISP, I would not try to go much higher.

The Edgerouter 5 POE didn't get much development attention. It appears to have the same CPU as the Edgerouter-Lite, which works well with OpenWrt, but it is an older chip and not much faster than MT7621.

At this point you're spending money needlessly on the 800 plan. Unless you get a better router the 200 is all you can use.

3

MT7621 will do ~500mbit, the SoC in EdgeRouter Lite is about half as fast tops.

4

Thanks folks, these are the sort of answers i was after. Very helpful :slight_smile:

5

Also keep in mind that there are reasonable hardware options able to deal with routing 1 GBit/s at wirespeed, as detailed in So you have 500Mbps-1Gbps fiber and need a router READ THIS FIRST (tl;dr, RPi4+USB3_ethernet, r4s, x86_64, …).

6

We have seen speeds with a MT7621 of over 300Mpbs using a 5G modem and Bjorn Mork has had speeds of over 900Mpbs using fiber.

You can help it a bit by using Routing/NAT Offloading in Firewall.

7

This sounds great, so i just went and enabled it:

uci set firewall.cfg01e63d.flow_offloading
uci set firewall.cfg01e63d.flow_offloading_hw

And now a quick curl -o /dev/null test gives me… exactly the same speed :smile: 20 MB/s.
Is there more i'm supposed to do?

8

Just use Luci and go to Network->Firewall and set them there.

I've been told it speeds up things for some routers at least. These are routers using 5G modems so your situation may be different.

9

Thanks for your help, @Dairyman, that's actually what i did. I just copy-pasted the uci commands displayed by Luci to share them here.
Maybe @bmork can chime in?