Tech Forum

rolandc wrote:Yes,
& you could even compare it to the ASA5505. through put is limited by the security settings. It will get better soon. Maybe

Its also why they do not stream very well.

Care to share.... Are the 881W going to be updated to fix some if these issues we see? Who do we ring at the Central Office to voice our interest in a better config.

4 years later ...

Any update? We have a genealogy event coming up in our stake, and one of the organizers believes he has managed to get a temporary bump in internet speed. However, we are still saddled with the 881w. Every time I get assistance from the GSC the techs always mention that our firewalls are some of the oldest they've seen. Our FM manager has said we're scheduled for replacement this year. With what, and when, who knows? Something tells me it will be more of the same.

For temporary events, is it even possible or allowable to use the LDS domain and DNS with another router/firewall?

Hagothsen wrote:...managed to get a temporary bump in internet speed.

Bump your speeds from what to what? We're on a 100/100 fiber connection and have 881W's in all 3 of our buildings happily cruising along at 80-100 Mb/s. The 881W's used to be slower, but one or two years ago they were rescripted which greatly improved throughput by removing some features that weren't needed.

I haven't run a speedtest for a while, so the above numbers are only from memory. I'll rerun a speedtest in the next couple of days and post the results in this thread.

100/25

We currently have 25/5. With all 5 firewalls, 881s all, I have to call the GSC to get them to manually set the WAN port to full duplex, otherwise we're capped at 10. If a firewall gets refreshed, it defaults back to auto, and I have to enlist the GSC to get back over 10. I'm guessing we didn't get your faster version of the script in our area. Do you know what verbiage I'd use to get it? The front-line techs at the GSC all say my older 881s are good for 25 at most.

We have early 881W's. The modem download speed was around 32Mbs. The 881 gave around 15Mbs. After rescripting, the speed became almost the same as the modem.
Found in TM under Usage Statistics, on ours the current version of the Firewall Script, is 2.01.

Hagothsen wrote:With all 5 firewalls, 881s all, I have to call the GSC to get them to manually set the WAN port to full duplex, otherwise we're capped at 10.

That may be a failure of auto-negotiation with the modem.

I have to wonder - since your setting is different, GSC might have had to set your device to not get auto-updates to prevent overwriting that change.

I'll just wait until the faster internet speed is actually realized and deal with it then. I might just use another router for the event, and whitelist specific sites, or use OpenDNS to blacklist inappropriate sites.

I just performed several passes at speedtest.net with an empty building using a wired PC. The results were 80 Mb/s download and 95 Mb/s upload. This was using 100/100 fiber service.

I'm guessing the difference between DL and UL speeds might be that the Cisco 881W has to process incoming data more thoroughly to make sure it doesn't violate the standards set by the church, while outgoing data goes through with much less processing. This is just off the top of my head, so I might be wrong.

In any case, I think this closely represents the maximum throughput of the 881W. Meaning, if your ISP is providing you with anything less than 80 Mb/s, the 881W should be sufficiently fast to serve your needs.

I'd be curious about the speed without the 881W. I'd think getting 95% of rated speed is pretty good.

Russellhltn, the throughput for download does depend on a few things. The download probably does have to pass through a firewall, which needs to do a packet inspection. The question becomes is the firewall doing a packet by packet inspection? If it is then it the CPU on the firewall will come into play. Also if there is an Access Control List (ACL) that has to be inspected, then it will also have to go to the CPU. I don't think the 881's are set up with ASIC chip sets that take that processing off the CPU and put it at the port level. So I'm not surprised that the you may not get the performance that the fiber cables can provide.

Terry