Tag: router
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TP-Link M8550 Review: A 3.4 Gbps Router on a 107 Mbps Network
A very good mobile 5G router will not save you from a spectrum-poor carrier. I tested two different SIMs and the results were surprising .
I bought a TP-Link M8550 to give myself a working internet connection at a desk where the wired option isn’t mine to control. It’s a battery-powered 5G hotspot with Wi-Fi 6E, a touchscreen, a gigabit Ethernet port and a S$455 price tag.
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Three Tunnels, One Ceiling: Part 2
Part 1 ended with four wrong answers and a set of conclusions I was reasonably confident about. I have another Windows workstation, so I ran the same test from it the following day, and then moved it through every router path in turn. Three of those conclusions didn’t survive the afternoon.
The method is unchanged:
curl -4, 1 GB per stream, single then four in parallel, CPU sampled across every transfer, and a control taken with the tunnel switched off. One addition. On the client-side tunnel I read the tunnel adapter’s byte counter before and after each run, which is a harder path proof than asking an external service what address it sees. Every client run showed 106% of payload crossing the interface, the extra 6% being WireGuard encapsulation. You can’t fake that by accident. -
Three Tunnels, One Ceiling
Having just found that my router’s VPN was carrying only half my traffic, the obvious next question was how fast the half it did carry actually went. What I expected was a straightforward protocol comparison. What I got was four wrong conclusions in a row, each one caused by a measurement that looked reasonable and wasn’t.
The numbers are below, and so is the method — including the parts of the method that failed, because those turned out to be the useful bit.
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Half a VPN
This started as a small question. I was reading about WebRTC leaks — the trick where a browser, asked politely by a webpage, will happily enumerate every IP address on every interface it can see and hand them over, VPN or no VPN. I was scoffing at the idea that I had any exposure, but just to answer my curiosity, I ran hide.me‘s own leak test to see what my browser was giving away.
The browser was a solvable problem. Three Firefox prefs and it stops volunteering host candidates. But while I had the test page open, I noticed something in the results that had nothing to do with WebRTC, and I spent the next two days on it instead. It took a few reboots and reconfiguration in 3 different places. Thankfully, there was no downtime during peak K-drama timings!
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Where Guest Network Pro Runs Out
The topology post ended on a promise. I said Guest Network Pro on the RT-BE88U would let me finally segment the IoT and media gear off the main network, and that having hardware which supported it natively removed my last excuse for not doing it.
It removed about seventy percent of the excuse. This is where the other thirty percent lives.