Hi.
The Netgear WAC104 is advertised as an AP and so is lacking a WAN port. As this device uses DSA, it is nevertheless easy to assign one of the LAN port as a WAN port, and thus creating a real router.
Question is: what will be the perfomance of routing, as all the 4 ports belong to the same switch hardware? I'm suspecting a sluggish result.
I may recover such a device lately, and I have several recycling scenarios. Goal is to evaluate the relevance of recycling the device as a fallback router. At least some minimal performance is expected, let's say 200-300 Mbit/s. If not I will recycle it as an AP.
I have already looked at it specs, and I already know its close related R6220. I don't expect wonder in any case, it's a basic device. I'm just looking for some advice in order to choose the best recycling scenario.
There is one viable strategy, test it and you'll know
At least for devices you get hold of free of charge, this is the best way to know for sure.
Even the dual-core mt7621a SOC isn't particularly fast, but it profits from very well supported ethernet drivers and accelerators (packet engines) - so how fast it will be in practice, depends on a) your demands and b) if your usage profile predominantly falls into the fast path (which can be offloaded).
Yes of course, but I still don't have it. And it may be a few weeks until I will.
I was wondering if anyone has already tried the device as a router. In the meantime I can try to simulate this with a R6220. I know where to find one.
I had access to a R6220 today, and I have been able to simulate WAN using a LAN port. Using master snapshot and hw offloading, the routing reaches 800Mbit/s, which is quite impressive. I was not expecting this.
Mediatek can really shine if the traffic rules are easy enough to be offloaded to hardware. The well adapted ethernet drivers are its biggest asset, which offset the slower SOCs to quite some extent.
