Please help me decide whether to install DD-WRT on my R8000

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aruffell
aruffell's picture
Please help me decide whether to install DD-WRT on my R8000

I assume lots of others are a bit skeptical on going through the hassle of installing DD-WRT on their shiny new NetGear R8000 not knowing whether it will work properly or not. I have been using DD-WRT on a large number of router for many years and generally love it - when it works - so I am super tempted to install DD-WRT on my latest router - the R8000.

 

Here are my concerns:

1) I have 1 Gbps symmetric fiber optic service from UVerse to my house. With my old DD-WRT router I could not even get close to 1 Gbps on my LAN and all I could get via wireless was about 50 Mbps. I purchased the R8000 and now I get over 900Mbps up and down from my ISP. I am concerned that DD-WRT will negatively affect my ability to maximize the connection speed with my ISP. I really do not need over 900 Mbps internet connection speeds but the geek in me just finds that too cool to have... Has anyone verified that the R8000 with DD-WRT will not negatively impact its performace when connected to an ISP that provides 1 Gbps throughput up and down? (ie.: Google Fiber / ATT Uverse GigaPower)

 

2) I have read another thread on this forum talking about poor wireless performance and although I have very little devices that are already AC, I do not want to start fighting that battle. Is the wireless performance up to par with what this router's hardware can do?

 

3) In my years using DD-WRT I had long periods of time where everything worked great but I have also had long torturous periods where the firmware was just broken and it took forever to get an update. I really love this firmware and would love to contribute $$ to its development if only doing so guaranteed more reliable releases! Is anything major broken with this first release for the R8000?

 

4) Since this firmware seems to be updated by a 3rd party unrelated to the main DD-WRT effort, I wonder how reliable the releases will be. By reliable I mean in terms of updates being released rather than bugs/issues. Any reassurance on this?

 

I hope to join you all by installing DD-WRT on my router soon but a few words to reassure me I won't be wasting lots of time would be great for me and for all those in the same boat.

aruffell
aruffell's picture
Not having received any

Not having received any replies to this post, I went ahead and installed DD-WRT on my R8000. At this point everything seems to be working fine and I am happy to have the DD-WRT features back in my toolbox however I do have a speed concern... Prior to the upgrade I was able to measure about 950Mbps up and down from my ISP (ATT Uverse Gigapower) but all day today after the update I am unable to exceed 350Mbps up/down. I have had this happen before as they seem to have intermittent network issues so unless others have noticed the same thing, I must assume DD-WRT can't handle higher WAN speeds. I replaced my previous router, also running DD-WRT, because I was stuck at about 300Mbps. I was sure it was the router in that case as the same speedtest whilst connected directly to ATT's gateway produced speeds close to the gigabit mark while connected to the DD-WRT router it wasn't even close. If I do not see any changes tomorrow I will run the same test and possibly revert back to stock :-( firmware to verify with 100% certainty (or close to) that it isn't a network issue but rather a firmware issue. Has anyone seen this same issue?

Latest measurement from att.com/speedtest:

Download Speed: 287667 kbps (35958.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 284296 kbps (35537 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 2 ms
Jitter: 1 ms

aruffell
aruffell's picture
I reverted back to stock as

I reverted back to stock as testing speed connected directly to the Uverse Router I was getting nearly 800 Mbits down and around 300 Mbits up while testing the speed connected to the R8000 running the latest DD-WRT firmware I could not get beyond 300 Mbits up/down. Once I reverted to stock firmware I ran the test again and got an even closer to norm result:

Last Result:
Download Speed: 893712 kbps (111714 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 883811 kbps (110476.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 2 ms
Jitter: 1 ms
‎11‎/‎10‎/‎2014‎ ‎18‎:‎53‎:‎36

Results vary quite a bit but the test results while running DD-WRT were consistely capped at under 300 Mbits so this makes me wonder if I really did not even need to upgrade my previous router as it too was capped at 300 Mbits and was running DD-WRT on NetGear hardware... oh well... the R8000 sure looks cooler ;)

aruffell
aruffell's picture
Not having received any

Not having received any replies to this post, I went ahead and installed DD-WRT on my R8000. At this point everything seems to be working fine and I am happy to have the DD-WRT features back in my toolbox however I do have a speed concern... Prior to the upgrade I was able to measure about 950Mbps up and down from my ISP (ATT Uverse Gigapower) but all day today after the update I am unable to exceed 350Mbps up/down. I have had this happen before as they seem to have intermittent network issues so unless others have noticed the same thing, I must assume DD-WRT can't handle higher WAN speeds. I replaced my previous router, also running DD-WRT, because I was stuck at about 300Mbps. I was sure it was the router in that case as the same speedtest whilst connected directly to ATT's gateway produced speeds close to the gigabit mark while connected to the DD-WRT router it wasn't even close. If I do not see any changes tomorrow I will run the same test and possibly revert back to stock :-( firmware to verify with 100% certainty (or close to) that it isn't a network issue but rather a firmware issue. Has anyone seen this same issue?

Latest measurement from att.com/speedtest:

Download Speed: 287667 kbps (35958.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 284296 kbps (35537 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 2 ms
Jitter: 1 ms

aruffell
aruffell's picture
I reverted back to stock as

I reverted back to stock as testing speed connected directly to the Uverse Router I was getting nearly 800 Mbits down and around 300 Mbits up while testing the speed connected to the R8000 running the latest DD-WRT firmware I could not get beyond 300 Mbits up/down. Once I reverted to stock firmware I ran the test again and got an even closer to norm result:

Last Result:
Download Speed: 893712 kbps (111714 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 883811 kbps (110476.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 2 ms
Jitter: 1 ms
‎11‎/‎10‎/‎2014‎ ‎18‎:‎53‎:‎36

Results vary quite a bit but the test results while running DD-WRT were consistely capped at under 300 Mbits so this makes me wonder if I really did not even need to upgrade my previous router as it too was capped at 300 Mbits and was running DD-WRT on NetGear hardware... oh well... the R8000 sure looks cooler ;)

Mojolacerator2
Mojolacerator2's picture
I flashed DD-WRT on my R8000,

I flashed DD-WRT on my R8000, worked great, reboots on it's own every night and goes back to DD-WRT factory defaults, complete with password reset prompt. Reverted to Factory Image which sucks because DD-WRT was significantly faster. Just don't want to setup my router every morning, hope DD developers fix that issue. I will re-flash DD when it is stated that this issue is fixed.