You absolutely must secure your home router and you probably can't

[LockeCJ]

@hurleyef

Check your interfaces to see what speed they have negotiated. You may have some fast Ethernet ports in there somewhere; they are still surprising common, especially on cheap wifi routers. Also check your cables, especially if you terminated them yourself.

The router itself is a PC with 4 GbE ports. I can see that the WAN port is running at 1000 Mb/s, but the LAN port connecting it to my GbE switch is only running at 100 Mb/s.

@austintx

Google Fiber utilizes VLAN packet tagging, for no really necessary reason. You’ll enjoy sharply curtailed throughput (even though the port is operating at 1Gb speed) unless your router supports it and you can figure out how to configure VLAN tag re-writing.

I’m running a pfSense router precisely because of this. It makes setting up VLAN tagging extremely easy, relatively speaking.

@austintx

DD-WRT seems to support it, but I never got it working. (If DD-WRT is so damn great, why does it seem like no-one shares their configuration recipes?) There are some tutorials online for configuring certain SO/HO switches to replace your Google Fiber router as gateway so you can get full speed. You’d connect that to the fiber jack and then you hang your gigabit-capable router of choice after it.

I actually got this working on a DD-WRT flashed router (TP-Link Archer C9). LIke most online forums, the DD-WRT message board is where information goes to die. Once I got the VLAN tagging set up, I discovered that DD-WRT didn’t support hardware acceleration of the NICs, so they would max out at 100 Mb/s anyway. My pfSense solution (at least theoretically) has both the power and hardware support to handle this.

@austintx

Placing a router, even a gigabit one, after the Google router results in a huge performance hit. But, I’d rather have my router manage my devices, so I settle for ~500Mbps and conceal my devices from Google behind a DD-WRT router which is configured to present a PC’s MAC on the WAN side so Google thinks it’s just a laptop.

I only get ~700Mbps when my PC is directly connected to the Google router anyway so the difference isn’t noticeable. 500Mbps for $73.71/mo is still a good deal!

PM me if you’re interested in ditching the Google Fiber Box entirely. I can run through and document my setup pretty easily.