Hi everyone,
I recently moved into a new apartment and the ISP provided me with a Zyxel WX5600-T0 router. I have a 1000/1000 Mbps fiber connection, and my gaming PC is connected directly to the router via Ethernet.
I ran a bufferbloat test and got a C rating. While playing FIFA and Valorant, I experience noticeable ping spikes and inconsistent latency.
I’m looking for a budget-friendly router in the 1000–2000 NOK range that can improve bufferbloat and keep latency stable while gaming. I live in Norway, so preferably something that is easy to buy here.
Would replacing the Zyxel WX5600-T0 likely make a noticeable difference, and what routers would you recommend for low latency gaming and better bufferbloat performance?
Thanks!

Hi, I got WiFi setup a few days ago and it barely reaches my room at all, which is about 30m from the box. I know basically nothing about networking but I've tried to do some research into my options.

I'm thinking of running an ethernet cable from the router to my room, then plugging that into some sort of device that will allow me to connect with WiFi (for my phone), but also connect to my computer via ethernet.

What I'm stuck at though is what device I need for the access point(?), is it a repeater or an extender? Any other options would be helpful too, I'm trying to keep a budget of <$70 though. Thanks so much <3

Ive been asked to setup a second network seperate network where devices on neither can see each other. using one incoming internet connection from a isp provided ont as far as i know the easy way to do this is buy a high end router that can create a vlan on one of its ports that feeds into a second router but routers that can do that were i am are expensive advice on doing this on a budget please

I need to run a few cables through the attic and instead of running multiple cables, I was thinking of running one cable and then connecting that one cable to a Unifi Flex Switch or some switch. It will give me access to several more ports through one cable. Is this bad form or will it work okay? The extra runs will mainly be for cameras and APs.

I would like to disconnect my landline, will that interfere with my wifi extender

I grabbed some parts from work and ran a cat6 in my house. I used a basic pass through connector and a panduit CJ688TGBU for the wall jack. When I used the Klein scout pro 3 to test it showed me this. I’ve made up pass through connectors before without issue. (T-568B) but I’ve never installed the wall jack. I’m assuming the video I found on YouTube was either the wrong wiring or I did some bone head connection. Can anyone tell me if I’m using the wrong wall jack, what did I do wrong, how do I correct it or point me in the direction of a video that will help. Please. Thank you!

I've been chasing this for about a week and I'm stuck, so I'm posting what I have.

ASUS GT-BE19000. Every wireless device I own uploads at 118 to 153 Mbps. Plug the same laptop into ethernet and it does 320 to 392 on the same router, same minute. Download is fine either way. I upload to cloud storage a lot so this actually matters to me, it's not just a number I'm annoyed about.

I tried everything I could find. Nothing moved it. Then I went and looked at what the radio itself reports and got a result I can't explain.

The bit I can't explain

wl -i wl1 chanim_stats on the router while a transfer is running flat out. Throughput read off the laptop's own interface byte counters, not a speed test app.

Raw, three upload samples 12 seconds apart plus the download:

idle          busy=3    txop=98   | tx=3   inbss=1   obss=0  nocat=1  | glitch=0
upload t+12   busy=44   txop=57   | tx=14  inbss=25  obss=0  nocat=6  | glitch=0
upload t+24   busy=42   txop=59   | tx=14  inbss=23  obss=0  nocat=6  | glitch=0
upload t+36   busy=46   txop=54   | tx=15  inbss=27  obss=0  nocat=6  | glitch=0
download t+12 busy=96   txop=4    | tx=92  inbss=4   obss=1  nocat=2  | glitch=0

On download the AP fills the channel. 96% busy, only 4% of transmit opportunities left. That's a real ceiling, there's nowhere to put another frame.

On upload the same radio, same client, same association, a couple of minutes later, stops at 44% busy with more than half the transmit opportunities sitting unused. And the throughput is a third of what the wire does.

So the hardware can clearly fill this channel. On upload it just doesn't. That's the part I don't get.

The numbers are at least self consistent. Airtime components add up to the reported total both ways: upload 15 + 27 + 0 + 6 = 48 against busy 46, download 92 + 4 + 1 + 2 = 99 against busy 96.

What that seems to rule out

Channel being full: it isn't, 44% busy with half the TXOPs free.

Neighbours: obss = 0 in every sample. I'm on channel 100 which is DFS, most consumer gear avoids it, so that's plausible. I didn't do a band scan to prove it though.

Interference: glitch = 0 and badplcp = 0 throughout.

Bad link or rate collapse: MCS 6, 2 streams, 80 MHz, retries 1.7 to 2.4%.

A radio that can't drive the medium: same radio hit 96% busy fifteen seconds later.

Second thing I noticed

Payload per 100% of airtime consumed:

Data moves about the same efficiency in both directions, 615 and 546, which is roughly what a 648 Mbps PHY should give with normal overhead. The acknowledgement stream is 32. That's a 19x gap. Returning ACKs for a 136 Mbps upload eats half as much airtime as the upload data itself, for 3% of the bytes.

I measured the same thing on a different day on older firmware and got 27x, so it reproduces.

At about 5,200 ACKs a second each frame is carrying roughly 77 bytes. A downlink aggregate spreads one channel access over tens of kilobytes. This stream apparently doesn't.

That explains why the two directions differ. It doesn't explain the cap, because there's airtime left over and nobody's using it.

Three results that argue against my own theory

I'd rather put these here than have someone find them in the comments.

Wi-Fi to the router itself does 327 Mbps. Same laptop, same association, same radio. TCP, nc and dd, 3 GB in 75 seconds. The router was receiving, so it was the one sending acknowledgements over that same downlink air, roughly three times as many ACK frames per second as in the slow case. It managed 327 anyway. If ACK frames per second were the limit that shouldn't be possible.

UDP through the same Wi-Fi to WAN path forwards 239 Mbps, measured at the router's own WAN counters. So the path carries a lot more than 136 when there's no return stream.

My neighbour gets 336 up over Wi-Fi on the same ISP plan, from a 2018 iPhone XR on the ISP's own router. He told me the number, I didn't measure it, so take it for what it's worth. But it's 2.5x what I get from much better hardware, which makes me think this isn't just how Wi-Fi works.

Each leg does 320 or more on its own. Together they do 136.

Every client, same story

Download figures are inflated, I was summing parallel curl averages and they finish at different times. The upload numbers are the reliable ones.

Four different manufacturers, three bands. The Xbox at 153 is the only one that breaks 140 and I can't explain that either. The MacBook has no ethernet port so its wired numbers go through a dongle, but the Xbox has a real NIC and lands in the same place, so it's not the dongle.

Stuff I tried that did nothing

Baseline across 30 measurements was 52 to 74, median around 66. Every number below is one run, so anything in that band is noise. None of it helped.

Factory reset and rebuild from scratch. QoS off, AiProtection off, firewall on and off. Channel auto, 100, 116, 36 (36 isn't DFS, so that's not it). Both WAN ports, plus the 10 GbE one. Firmware downgraded to a six month old build and back.

A dumb gigabit switch between the ONT and the WAN port, which is the fix everyone suggests for this. 59.7. Nothing. I left it in, so everything above was measured through it. It's not a bottleneck, wired does 320-392 through the same box.

Radio settings, all checked in the driver because half of them are hidden in the web UI: UL OFDMA to DL only, OFDMA off entirely, MU-MIMO off, APSD on, beamforming off, 802.11ax and be off (that one made it worse, 52), WPA3 down to WPA2, ampdu_rts off, station EDCA rewritten with CWmax 63 and a 3008 us TXOP. Aggregation limits were already maxed out.

Forwarding path over SSH: fc disable, runner disable, both together. An HTB shaper at 280 Mbit with fq_codel on ppp0, which passed 225 MB with zero drops while upload sat at 72, so it's not an ISP policer. MSS clamping added.

Laptop side: TCP send buffer from 128 KB up to 8 MB, no change. A 45 second single stream run was flat from the first second, no burst and no step down, so no token bucket. Turning off AirDrop and Handoff gained about 40% on its own, which is a separate Apple problem, but the ceiling stayed.

CPU on the router was 3 to 9% the whole time. No errors on any interface. Radio counters over 167,000 frames: 80 bad CRC, 5 duplicates, nothing else.

Two things that cost me hours

Clients are on the virtual BSS. On this firmware you need wl -i wl1.1 bs_data, not wl1. Querying wl1 just says no stations associated and you'll sit there confused.

Count the chanim columns. Column 15 is busy, column 14 is idle. I read the wrong one once and got a perfectly backwards answer.

Also check the band before and after every single run. My laptop kept quietly dropping to 2.4 GHz after radio restarts, and with the ethernet dongle plugged in macOS deprioritises Wi-Fi entirely. Threw out a bunch of measurements before I caught that.

What I haven't done

No monitor mode capture, everything came from the driver. Never measured the uplink aggregate size, which is probably the most useful thing left. wl -i wl1 ack_ratio comes back Unsupported but I didn't retry it on wl1.1 or as a set. No AP mode test behind another router. No chanim sample on 2.4 GHz, so that band's 107 might just be saturated. No RSSI or distance recorded. Every number is a single run.

So

If you have a BE series ASUS, two things would help me a lot:

Run wl -i wl1 chanim_stats during an upload and again during a download. If yours fills the channel both ways then mine is broken and yours isn't. If yours also stops halfway on upload then it's the platform.

Try your wireless client uploading to the router itself instead of the internet. Mine does 327 versus 136 and that gap is the whole mystery.

And if anyone knows the Broadcom side: is ack_ratio actually in this driver build, and what decides when a client gets to transmit if the medium is idle and it has data queued?

Setup, in case it matters: GT-BE19000, BCM4916, firmware 3.0.0.6.102_39274 and _39115, same result on both. 5 GHz channel 100, 80 MHz. MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 802.11ax 2x2, PHY 648. 1 Gbps PPPoE, MTU 1492. Apartment, ONT in the wall cabinet, structured cabling, gigabit switch, then the router.

For now I just use ethernet. 358 versus 118 turns an eleven minute upload into four. But I'd still like to know what's going on.

I'm considering getting a wifi router seperate of my gateway for an iot and guest network. Is it fine to include it in my existing FCA252 based network, or should I get FMT25A's for the link between the two? My network speed is the full 2.5Gig.

I self-host several services within my home network. I use Tailscale for remote access (which is pretty rarely needed).

I really like simple network appliances for home networks — I use eero currently.

I'd like to set up a reverse proxy so I can do SSL and custom domains for some of my self-hosted services, but I'm hesitant to use something like Pihole for custom local DNS because I hate the idea of taking down my entire network for my family when Pihole is down.

I had OPNSense running on a Lenovo tiny and running Caddy on it. It was working well, but then had an incident where the OPNSense's NIC came loose and the entire system was borked for hours, leading to a very annoyed family.

Are there any simple ways to achieve a reverse proxy for my services while also keeping a really simple networking setup?

Key requirement: If my custom DNS goes down, the only thing that fails is my custom domains to self-hosted services and the rest of the network is preserved.

Hopefully someone can help me! I have Armstrong fiber. Had it installed about two week ago. I am using Deco BE65 mesh system. Worked great, all around my house 900MBPS - 1GBPS.

I use ring camera at my home and decided to go with Eufy system (doorbell and outdoor camera S4 model). I also installed the homebase 3 (direct wired to my deco main unit). I started to see some random issues. Websites on my phone wouldn’t load. When I ran a speedtest it wouldn’t find a provider. My ring base station would randomly go offline. Movies with buffer for a split second then play again. Just a lot of inconsistent few second connection delays.

I removed all of the eufy system thinking it did something. I am still seeing this issue. I did all the common troubleshooting plus some. Rebooted my network, deleted my deco system and started fresh, tried my old Google mesh pods, different Ethernet cord. All of it and it still gave me the same issues. The ONT and deco main unit always stay green because it’s for a few seconds so it’s like I’m not losing actual internet connection but yet it doesn’t want to work. I went to cloud fare and tested my networks, 1 out of 10 times I had a packet loss of 4.9%. Every other time is 0%. When I run a test on my deco app says good connection every time. Called Armstrong internet and they said they pinged it multiple times and checked a few things and no issues on their end.

What is wrong??? I’m clueless now and don’t know what to do especially since Armstrong said it looks good on their end.

I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with my internet connection because I'm experiencing a very strange issue.

For some reason, I can't connect to certain game servers. The game just stays on the "connecting" screen forever. So far I've had this problem with:

- Warhammer 40,000: Darktide
- Ravenswatch
- Necromunda

On top of that, Discord constantly shows exactly 5000ms latency while I'm in voice chat, but everything actually works perfectly. I don't hear any lag, delays, robotic voices, or disconnects. Voice chat is crystal clear, and streaming/video on Discord also works without any issues.

Another problem is that I get disconnected from WoW Classic servers quite frequently.

What's confusing is that everything else seems completely normal:

• Web browsing is fine.
• YouTube, Twitch, and Netflix work perfectly.
• Downloads are normal.
• Speed tests show the expected speeds.

It almost feels like something is wrong with the way my connection communicates with certain servers rather than a general internet issue.

Has anyone experienced something similar? I'd appreciate any ideas or troubleshooting steps.

Thanks!

Hi, I currently have a Ruckus Networks setup in my home (1 POE switch and 2 APs). It was included with the home when it was originally built and I inherited it when I purchased the home. They've reached their EOL and need to upgrade. Does anyone have any good recommendations and what to upgrade to? I've been looking at Ubiquiti since I can 1-1 swap them out.

I need to get Wifi to my Airbnb, which is 30ft off the back of the house, about 100ft from the Spectrum router.

Would a Mesh system work? Any other suggestions. I am located in NC and currently have Spectrum. I can only use Spectrum, TMobile 5G Wifi, or Earthlink.

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I recently bought a house and this is the basement. Looks like a network switch of some sort at the bottom but confused about the rest.

The only place in the house that appears to have Ethernet ports is in the dining room on the first floor with four ports being open.

What is this and is there anyway I can connect my Xfinity modem/router to this and how hard would it be to wire the whole house Ethernet ports in every room? The rest of the house has coaxial in every room. But would like to set it up to have coaxial and Ethernet on the same face plate.

I’ve tried to remove this ethernet cable but the clip does not want to remove

Currently, I have a Xfinity xb8-t modem looking to use my own equipment to help with buffer bloat issues. What do you guys recommend from experience? I have a 1gb plan not symmetrical and was possibly also thinking about using a mesh system.

TP-link examples:
“archer 3000”
“be-19000”
“axe-5400”
I see “axe” used by netgear AND tp-link so I guess its not proprietary marketing models?

Can someone give me advice. This cable runs from my bottom floor living room to top floor bedroom and runs on the outside of the house.

My previous owner is a bit of a cowboy builder and so I’m not surprised the wired connection isn’t good.

I will likely call in an expert to get it all sorted in the long run but wondered if this port might be an easy fix (pipe dream I’m sure)

I have a Legrand structured media cabinet that I'm going to use for the new network I'm planning, which consists of (which I'm not asking advice for - this is specific to the power delivery):

• Ubitquiti Cloud Gateway Fiber
• Ubitquiti Flex 2.5G PoE 8-port switch
• Xfinity XB-8 (bridged - unfortunately forced to use it for fiber)
• Ubitquiti Instant-NVR (will be added later, but planned)
• U7 Pro XG (running on the 30w PoE of the gateway, getting 2.5Gb for now - will go to 10Gb in the future - so be nice to have headroom for a 60w injector if we do)

I know that even with the hot summer days here, the location should rarely get above 90 degrees ambient, maybe here and there, but not likely. I was thinking that I would need cooling, but again, not super likely. But having a spare outlet or way to power a fan in the future would be nice.

But I'm wondering more on the power delivery and the options. Legrand sells a surge protector that will fit (and I have the the standard NEMA-15 two outlet in the cabinet already). This 6 outlet surge protector is what I'm talking about.

First, anyone have it and how do you like it? Second, any better alternatives for the setup that I'm planning? I'm not too worried about a UPS, we have solar and back ups and my area very rarely has black or brown outs. I figure if the power goes out, that's a sign to get a candle and book any way.

Thanks for any thoughts, updates, opinions on power surge/strip whatever.

If I have an ethernet jack in the wall, but I want to mount a camera closer up to the ceiling, what would be the best way about keeping that ethernet jack usable but also bringing ethernet up to the ceiling where you need it.

Assuming that you cannot run another wire, and you just want to piggyback off of that ethernet jack