As you may recall in a previous blog post I mentioned I had changed from a Linksys to a Netgear router following a failure.

Well one of the un-looked for benefits of doing so was that the Netgear router appears to do a better job of handling data. I also recently upgraded my DSL to the fastest non business option that Bellsouth offered. This is their FastAccess DSL Xtreme 6.0 which is still anemic when compared to Europe and Asia but pretty fast for the US. Connected directly to the DSL modem I ran several speed tests.

The advertised speed for my brand of DSL was 6.0 Mbps down and 512 Kbps up. With the computer directly attached to the modem I was able to achieve these speeds.

I then bridged the modem and added the Linksys router to the equation. The best I was able to achieve then was 4.5 Mbps down and 380 Kbps up. The router overhead was significant.

On a whim I decided to re-run the speed tests now that I have the Netgear router in place.

This was amazing! After running the tests a number of times it is apparent that the Netgear router does not add as much “overhead” as the Linksys router. Now this is all very unscientific, I did not track the time of day, or day of week I ran the previous tests, and to be fair I should have run a number of tests over a longer period of time and from multiple locations etc. However, it is encouraging!

I know that the Linksys routers firmware source code is available, I wonder if the same is true of Netgear? And if so I wonder has anyone made any comparisons in efficiency and overall ability between the two?

Cheers,

Robert Porter