4 ms·
Does a router need that much compute? I've just moved and the walls here attenuate wifi signals dramatically. Was thinking about building my own router and bump
by A2017U1 7y ago
Does a router need that much compute? I've just moved and the walls here attenuate wifi signals dramatically. Was thinking about building my own router and bumping up the signal power. That or some sort of repeater.
- steve19 7y agoRouting gigabit with a stateful firewall does require a fair bit of computing power. But that is not going to solve your wifi signal problem. Use a mesh wifi setup to solve that one.
- A2017U1 7y agoThanks mate, been weighing up the options. Was not prepared for how bad it can be with thick rebar concrete walls. Only a few meters away from router and yet terrible signal. Far outside through a glass door has perfect signal. Ethernet over power and a mesh of AP's seems to be the best way.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoYou might consider checking out r/homelab if you're considering something big- the community is really large and supportive.
- pizza234 7y agoIt depends on the functionality. A VPN router (although it's likely not your case) has a ceiling of 2 MBit/s on an RPi 3b (with a standard, single-threaded, OpenVPN configuration), which is relatively little.
- Tharre 7y agoThis can't be right. Granted, I've not been running OpenVPN lately, but with WireGuard I'm saturating the internal USB-ethernet adapter of the pi long before I'm running out of CPU power.
- pizza234 7y agoYou're correct. I confused MBit with MByte - the correct number is 20 MBit/s.
- pizza234 7y agoImportant correction: 20 MBit/s, not 2.
- jsight 7y agoNo, routers do not require much CPU power. Typical consumer routers often have really limited CPUs. The biggest issue is getting enough bandwidth out of the Ethernet ports. For example, a Pi 3B+ can only handle 200Mbit or so. Whether that is enough for you will depend upon your WAN speed. Having said that, I'm less sure about your use case. You might could load OpenWRT on it and set it up to relay a wireless signal, but I doubt the performance would be great.