In our last update we shipped our first devices, I had been growing concerned with our dependence on these WD n600’s and n750’s especially as we began to realize some of their performance limitations.

Using Babel’s excellent in kernel forwarding design even the bargain bin n600 can hit line rate and mesh at 100mbps on several ports. But the encryption overhead for the Wireguard tunnel is non trivial and peters out at about 30mbps. Exactly why is a bit of a performance mystery, there’s about 50% free CPU time but no tuning I can find seems to improve it. Not bad for $16, but there’s untapped potential there.

What this means right now for Clatskine users is that they can resell to two other homes before they even cut into their own bandwidth.

In the search for better hardware the firmware builder now has support for the GL-AR750, Edgerouter X, and UniFi Lite. The AR750 was disappointing, for $25 it mirrors the performance of the n600’s since they share a chipset. The Edgerouter on the other hand makes a great Althea device, with gigabit speeds on the mesh and about 600mbps over Wireguard. The Lite is somewhat harder to test conclusively with the involvement of WiFi but breaches 200mbps over WireGuard easily enough for me to be unconcerned.

While the Edgerouter is great for network backbone tasks it’s lack of WiFI eliminate it from the running as an ideal home device. The UniFi lite has the opposite issue, great wifi, but with only one Ethernet port it won’t satisfy power users or have a ‘plug and play’ resale capability.

The quest for a under $100 device with no performance compromises continues.