Preparing for 1Gbps GPON

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hi. My ISP will start expanding their Fiber GPON coverage area and I want to prepare everything for it. Currently I have a ADSL Modem (9Mbps DL/1Mbps UL) and a TP-Link Archer C6 V3 (mt7621 with 2-core, 2-thread per core @ 880Mhz) as router/access point. Everything works great with SQM.

I was looking for a cheap device for handling 1Gbps with SQM, Optionally tor and ssh tunnel and I found this: www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/orange-pi-R1-Plus-LTS.html

It has two GbE, A 4-core Cortex A53 @ 1500Mhz (or 1300Mhz according to updated Rockchip document), 1 GB LPDDR3 ram and a MicroSD Slot for OS. Everything seems really great for a high-performance router.

The final approach looks like this:
... <---> GPON Modem <----> PPPoE Bridge for offloading workload of layer 3 <---> Orange Pi <---> TP-Link Archer C6 V3 as switch and dual-band access point

And my last question is the RK3328 requires an active cooler or a good thermal paste with heatsink will handle it?

Best Regards

2

Running fq_cake on it will not get you anyway near gigabit.
Managed to get 900 Mb/s on a Nanopi r4s which have a Rockchip rk3399 and that required some tweaking to get there.
Maybe fq_codel will get you close to the gigabit but if you wanted to do fq_cake as SQM you need something with a faster cpu.

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3

So sqm actually eats up the cpu, more than I thought. I'm now thinking about NanoPi R3S, It's not powerful as R4S (RK3566 vs RK3399) but slightly better option than Orange Pi.

It has 4-core Cortex A55 @ 1800Mhz.

If it can handle 700Mbits/s, It will be a good option for me.

4

I would consider the GL-MT6000/Flint 2. It should handle ~900mbps with SQM. I'm not sure if PPPoE will be a bottleneck at that speed (with SQM) but I think the Flint 2 would be a good upgrade and you could also replace the Archer C6 with it for better Wifi Performance and 2x2.5G Ports.

https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-mt6000#performance

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5

and if in EU, T-56, 40€ + S&H, almost the same hw as the MT6000, but no eMMC.

6

This looks like a beast, and a little too expensive for me. I'm happy with my Wi-Fi right now specially most of my devices don't support Wi-Fi 6.

T-56 is not available here.

I was doing more search about R3S and looks like a reliable option for 500Mbit/s SQM+Cake (near 600Mbits/s based on a user testing). I have no reason not to buy it at 55$ final price tag.

Thanks for suggestions.

7

7621 will forward 1.5gpbps +- with hardware offload, no sqm. If latency is still of concern you need some filogic or x86 router.

8

Where do you find this device for 40€ and what do you mean by + S&H?

9

S&H = Shipping and Handling

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10

Hard to say if you would get 700 Mb/s, according to the GL-MT6000 Documentation it gets above 800 Mb/s with a53 cores, from that it might be possible if some cpu affinity were done. Anyway the Nanopi r3s seems to be the better choice compared to the orangepi R1 in performance and power usage.

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11

Another approach could be RPi4 with TP-Link UE300 Adapter. RPi4 with 1GB ram is around 42$, Adapter is around 15$ and Aluminum+Fan is around 9$. with 66$ it can handle 1Gbps with SQM+cake. I actually have a RPi4 with 4GB ram for media center and Kodi but I don't want to turn it into a router.

I flashed ext4 image into a thumb drive, Booted it up and overclocked the CPU to 2300Mhz, After that turned on SQM+PieceOfCake on 1000000Kbps and ran iperf3 bidi test between my computer and RPi and result was too good to be true because the result was the same 943Mbits/s. I changed the settings to 5Mbit/s to make sure that SQM works and iperf3 was capped at 5Mbit/s.
wg-bench result was 1.11Gbps.

I saw people not recommending RPi4 to buy but It looks really better than R3S with just ~10$ more. There is any other reason or I did something wrong in my testings? (Except the fact that PPPoE will result in overhead).

Not to mention that BCM2711 has 4-core Cortex-A72 @ 1500Mhz with official overclock @ 1800Mhz and maybe with more overclock @ 2300Mhz

12

Not to mention unusable wifi leading to + 50 bucks for 7621

13

That's right but I will use My Archer C6 V3 as switch and dumb AP which has good mt76 driver.

14

For starters dont buy any%hing extra.

15

don't bother with arm toys, go with x86 beast.

16

Current gear forwards almost gig up gig down, no need for extra gadgets before you find there is any buffer bloat to fix.

17

Another solution could be one of the DFRobots routerboards paired with a Raspberry cm4 module.
This way you would avoid running on USB interface and get PCIE connection to the second NIC.

18

Occaisionally I have hope that fiber folk, sending stuff at the native 1Gbit rate of the interface will have minimal buffering. Ideally the GPON network interface supports BQL and thus fq_codel or cake could run natively, unshaped.

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19

Unfortunately in more cases than not greed ranks higher than ideal.
Where i am from fiber has been established by several different power companies which later on has sold off their networks to two companies. The ones that went with the ideal solution has all been downgraded to GPON networks.

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20

Thank you guys, I went with a old x86_64 laptop option which has 2-core (2 thread per core) Intel Core I7 5500U @ 3000Mhz which easily handles the load and just bought a UE300 around 15$ for second NIC.

Also installed NextCloud AIO and everything seems great.

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