Hello all, I’m looking at getting a pair of routers capable of running Wireguard VPNs, and running one as a VPN server on my home network, while traveling with the other one and using it as a VPN client to route traffic through my home network.
I’m looking for the pair of routers I could buy that will give me the best performance (measured by both bandwidth, and ping/latency). I thought this would be simple to determine, but there are a few things kind of slowing me down:
To my surprise, when comparing Wireguard speeds, the Slate AX travel router seems to have the highest potential bandwidth (550 Mbps), beating out even larger, home network options like the Flint (500 Mbps). And the router that’s supposed to be built specifically to be a VPN server, the Brume 2, maxes out at just 355 Mbps (!)
Muddying the waters, the webpages say those numbers are all from tests of the routers running in VPN client mode, and that max speeds in server mode will be lower. Does anybody know how max server speeds will compare to the max client speeds we’re given? Could router A be faster than router B when running in client mode, but router B is faster when you compare them running in server mode?
Long shot here, but does anybody know how much latency each router will add when running as a VPN server or client?
Latency has a lot of variables because in hotels/remote locations you are dealing with wireless and also other users using the network. Also you have to account for the internet/the routes your VPN is taking too
So in perfect conditions the latency should be pretty low but in shared internet situations that isnt always the case
What are the upload and download speeds of your home and your remote sites? I am using an AR300m at a family members house, as their upload speed, which is my download speed, is only around 40Mb/sec, so that is easily handled by an AR300m running Wireguard. Using a Slate AX would just use more power and take up more space at my family members house.
The airbnb I’m currently at can only do about 75Mb/sec up and down, which is better then many I have stayed at over the last 2 years, so once again a Slate AX is over kill for my travel router. My travel is an original Slate that is currently plugged into the hosts router, and works just find for me. It is smaller, lighter, and uses a much small power supply then the Slate AX with is very important to me, as I’m enjoying traveling the world with minimal stuff. I’m connecting my travel router to the AR300m when I need a residential IP address, and a couple US based cloud VPS I control when I just need a US IP address.
my home internet is fiber. all 3 test to same server.
home idle ping 12 down 23 up 16
dish 5g idle 32 down 325 up 282
wireguard through dish to home internet idle 68 down 73 up 68
i can test on att, t mobile and verizon if you need to see but from my travels it just depends on the tower and area i get service. from hotels it just depends on there internet if it will work in the first place. I can say that depending on your connection sometimes openvpn is faster for speed.
Wading in here to ask a question on a related topic. I have an admittedly elderly Asus RT-N66U router… Today I tried enabling the Open VPN server in this router, with a plan to be able to watch my in-country TV and streams while travelling abroad… it throws an insecure certificate error.
[ Edit - moving full post to an Asus Open VPN thread ]
Thanks! I tried to search for related posts but my Google search missed that one, my bad.
Yeah I figured latency will be crazy hard to figure out with any reliability. My intuition though was that it would be mainly tied to processing power (and/or number of cores?). Is that what you would guess as well?
Finally, any overall recommendations on the pair of routers to use? In that post, OP settled on a Brume 2 for the VPN server, but you recommended making the most powerful device your home router…which one would you say that is?
I’ll double check up/down at my home when I get back (won’t be back home today unfortunately). At the remote sites, it will vary while I’m traveling. Overall though I’m not concerned at spending a few extra dollars or watts on these routers. I’ll be using them for a while, and performant internet is going to have a big impact on my quality of life.
I’m particularly curious if any of these options might do better on latency. If I can spend an extra $50 and knock an extra 50ms off my latency, I would love that. But it looks like information that detailed is hard to come by.
Does “dish” refer to Dish Wireless, i.e. you’re doing those tests on your phone? Or maybe it refers to a satellite dish on your house? (If so, how does that fit into things, when your house already has a different fiber internet connection?)
Also kind of surprised that test 3 had better up/down ping than test 2, since it sounds like the tests are:
Test 2: Computer → through dish → speed test server, and then back to the computer
Test 3: Computer → through dish → home VPN server → through fiber → speed test server, and then back to the computer
But maybe just getting your packets to a fiber connection ASAP can result in the fastest internet
Finally, any more details on “sometimes openvpn is faster for speed”? Is that bandwidth, ping, or both? And any idea how that happens? I very surprised to hear that.
The latency of the router is going to be minimal if you are well withing its capabilities. I would recommend on both your home router and on your travel router to use Ethernet cables and not WIFI wherever possible, as each hop through a radio adds latency. On my PC I use a USB-3 to Ethernet adapter to connect to my router, and when possible, I use a Ethernet cable to connect to the router at the Airbnb I’m staying at.
on test 1 and 3 the tracert was the same with 8 stops but test 2 had 18 stops going to 1.1.1.1
and as far as openvpn it was something i noticed when i was on dish in june. the hotspot was connected just to att and when it had 5g it was band 5. i would get over 60Mb down just on the hotspot but when running wireguard it droped down to 5 Mb or less. I switched over to openvpn and it jumped to minimum of 15 Mb and ping went from 150ms to 80ms.
Huh. Wild about the wireguard/OpenVPN speed differences. Out of curiosity, how were you able to simply “switch” between them? Do you have 2 VPN servers set up? Or just one server that you can somehow reconfigure between wireguard/OpenVPN remotely?
Again, thanks for all the info, this is very interesting
the interface on the gl.inet routers has a simple vpn interface that you can turn on and off the vpn service that you are connected to. the server side i have both services setup running all the time.