Is the router the bottleneck?

Man of Honour
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I have a Netgear R7000 router which has been going solid for years now. I was on a Zen 150/30 FTTP connection which it seemed to handle fine. However I upgraded to 550/70 last week but I’m not getting the full speed.

Initially the speed was maxing out at 165/33. I found out about a bug with the R7000 which requires QoS to be enabled and disabled. I did this and also updated the firmware.

Now I’m getting 330/76. Zen provide 550 down with a guaranteed minimum of 500. They say the line is fine.

The speed test is being done from the router itself so that should rule out other connections influencing it.

Is the R7000 just too long in the tooth now or is there something else I could try?

Thanks.
 
Caporegime
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Plug your PC directly into the Openreach ONT and dial the PPPoE connection, then run a speed test. This will rule out the connection.
 
Man of Honour
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Plug your PC directly into the Openreach ONT and dial the PPPoE connection, then run a speed test. This will rule out the connection.
Hadn’t considered this, I’ll give it a go.

I've got a D7000 that does 1000 fine so you would expect the R7000 to have similar performance. A quick Google says they both have 1Ghz dual core CPUs but different models.
Yeah I thought it should be up to the task but it seems to be an issue many R7000 users face but not all. I have no desire to spend more money if it is up to the task, but I also don’t want to faff around for ages only to find I have to replace it.

I’ll report back if I find anything. Thanks.
 
Man of Honour
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So the strangest thing happened. I did the checks via the ONT and got full speed. I had fettled with the router and still couldn't figure out what the issue was. My son was printing out something for his homework and asked me to come help - the printer had an IP conflict message. I thought this was strange as the router was set as the sole DHCP server. To rule the issue out I went through all the devices in my house and assigned them static IPs.

However, there was a duplicate MAC address on the network. After whittling it down device-by-device, I discovered that the wife's iPhone was set up for MAC spoofing (a new iOS14 feature) but it was using the MAC address of the printer. I turned this off and, so far at least, everything is running fast and smooth.

Is it pure coincidence that the iPhone spoofed the MAC of the printer (surely not?!) or is it a poor design of the iOS feature that nabs a MAC address off the same network?

Also, is it possible this conflict was putting sufficient load on the router that it was impacting speed? Ever since it has been resolved I'm getting consistent 500/75 speed tests.
 
Soldato
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How strange, the chances of an iPhone randomly picking a MAC address already in use is extremely slim. From checking the devices I've got here, they seem to use unassigned MAC address blocks for the privacy stuff, so it makes it even more unusual that it picked a MAC that's already in use on your local network.
 
Permabanned
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Not so much putting load on it but confusing the heck out of it. There is no doubt some weird reason why the iphone picked up that particular mac, statistically it's pretty much impossible that it arrived at it randomly.
 
Man of Honour
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I can only guess there’s some sort of bug in the iOS release? I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and cross checked multiple times, they were definitely the same! As you say it is pretty much statistically impossible. Maybe I should do the lottery?
 
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