Easygoing1

Well, I got my R2 unit and ... this was the driod im looking for ... I can't help but feel like im totaly ruined now ... this is Call of Duty ... Elite style ... it's a completely different game ... God forbid I ever have to play it again without this technology.

Fraser, i ordered an R2 unit (lol) and paid with PayPal but your website never asked me for my shipping information … does the site pull that info from PayPal or something? Edit: nvm, I found the order confirmation button in another tab … and you do have my address I must have put it in when I created an account for the forum. Mike

On COD, I don’t think I’ve ever had a session with ping times lower than 80ms. And I’ve been reading on various sites where people are claiming that they consistently get gaming sessions in the 10 to 15 ms range with NetDuma OS on their router. If those kinds of improvements are a reality in this universe … pardon the pun … but that’s a HUGE game changer. A 50 ms reduction in a game like COD can make a difference between having a grin on your face and wanting to send your controller on its first solo flight through a window. And I’m not talking about being able to perceive details at those speeds I’m talking about knowing and seeing that I hit a guy but I’m the one who ends up dead… that’s a direct cause from network lag. and I completely agree with you about QOS. I think it’s best application to date has been VOIP. And outside of that, it’s basically useless. I’ve often compared fine tuning QOS to reassembling shattered glass. If you manage to actually do it … it might feel like an accomplishment, but it’s not really gonna do a damn thing for you in the long run … back to what I said in an earlier post about packets still leaving and coming in one at a time … now with high bandwidth internet and a competent CPU and software written by someone who truly gets it … I would imagine you could monitor certain types of traffic and use some statistical math to figure out the optimal microsecond windows for releasing ‘low priority’ packets … and from what I’m reading, NetDuma OS must do something similar to that outside of geofencing which was a brilliant idea whoever came up with it. I would also imagine that NetDuma OS would really need to have as much control of a routers CPU as possible to be truly effective… it would most likely exist in the kernel of the OS. This also makes me think that any partnerships that they have with companies like Netgear … require a lot of meetings and design consulting cause Netgear would most certainly insist on their fluff existing on the router where NetDuma probably prefers that house to be clean so it can do what it does best. …. Which tends to lean me in the direction of buying one of their routers and staying away from the bloat ware routers all together.

I completely agree ... I'm a huge fan of KEEP IT SIMPLE ... for most things in life but especially for IT technology ... the more "features" you throw at an operating system, the larger then the question mark is that floats above it in an array of categories - just pick one. I like to unbox a router and fire it up and then go in and disable as many "features" as I can ... then enable one by one only those things I need and of course anything that depends on them... this is why I put OpenWRT on my Netgear 6800 because I wanted to compile a router OS that only did a few things that I needed... routing of course, firewall with nat / pat, dhcp, WiFi and an ssh service ... and it ran pretty good ... but now it's doing some really fun tricks ... like when you issue a command that pulls down new versions of the modules install in the OS, it like to brick itself and go into an cycle where it just constantly reboots... and now it's doing more interesting things like dropping WiFi for a minute without so much as a whisper as to why ... it's time to to put it out to pasture. I bought it used ... cause the price was right ... but I think I learned my lesson. I've played with a lot of Cisco hardware ... my first experience with Cisco was back when they first came out with their voip system (AVVID I believe it was called with "call manager" servers) back when the IPPBX ran on Windows ... I rather liked their methodology in their firewall switches and router designs. I was full time with the city I live in as their second hire in their IT department which was under Finance back then... I convinced them that paying for a pots line to every desk in city hall was like shoveling cash into a furnace... when I showed them the numbers to replace those phones with an in house system they said "ok ... why don't you go ahead and do that for us..." which ended up being a really fun project. I got to spec and purchase something like 1.4 million dollars of Cisco hardware ... two blade switches, 20 some odd routers with switches for all the remote sites, a $20k PIX firewall ... I was in hog heaven and I learned a lot about switching and routing just rolling that project out. You know, in the vein of keeping things simple ... if I had, for example, one of every brand of router with DumaOS on it, I would set one up at a time and drop it over at my friends house and let him use each one for a few days at a time ... I guarantee you by the time he finished testing them all ... he would be able to tell me which one was the best one ... or which ones were the best ones ... because sometimes ... you just have to see how the damn things work in a real situation rather than quibble over the tech details which could become a conversation that has no end to it... as you well know being in the testing field ... you can zero in on way too much minutia if you don't force yourself to just stick to what matters most. And really there is no metric for answering a question like "which one is the fastest" ... because each brand and flavor implements what it does in a way that is going to be different from the other brands and flavors so you just have to use them and see which ones shine and which ones don't. I watched a youtuber do a review of something like 5 different gaming routers last week ... his video production was pro status but in the end, he had these fancy graphs and the one he used to tell the audience which router was the fastest ... was the chert that showed the average ping response times from each router when he just set up a ping and let it run for a few minutes ... got the average delay time, then did the same test with the next router...once I picked my jaw up off the floor, I commented on his video and said that ... perhaps next time he reviews gaming routers ... he might think about actually playing some games through the routers and just see how they perform ... I then lectured him a little on how AND WHY ICMP response times are basically worthless as a metric for a routers speed capabilities ... I doubt he will read my comments with an open mind considering he seems to be quite successful as a youtube content creator whos main focus is IT stuff... the blind leading the blind seems to be a fitting analogy for what he does I think... DumaOS being designed by gamers for gamers is awesome! What I wanna know is ... why did they stop at the software? Why not take an "Apple-esque" approach and find some good hardware then customize the hell out of their software so that it is very tightly coupled with the "personality" of that hardware... Heck if they're savvy enough, they could even write the hardware libraries ... find a really light weight linux kernel and make a router that dose one thing and does it VERY WELL ... GAMING! I would even insist that the routers don't have wifi or anything other than what is necessary to get packets across networks and also shape that traffic so that it only knows gaming traffic.I would have a flagship model that would boggle peoples minds... "Why doesn't it have WiFi? and "you mean my kinds can't do their social networking stuff through this router?" ... maybe have a dedicated hardware bridge where all non-gaming traffic just gets passed on to another port where the family router connects to ... but when its got an active gaming stream running, even that bridge gets disabled or it flows those packets with separate hardware with an extremely low priority ram based packet queue which could be configured to be shut down when an active game stream is happening... They would be for a very niche customer base.. but I guarantee you that the gaming purists out there would salivate over a router like that ... I think it would do very well actually. And it wouldn't need to look like an alien space ship either ... because the kind of people who would buy that router could care less if it existed inside a brown paper bag ... as long as it gives them the edge they want in their games ... they spend good money on stuff like that.

Fraser, several days ago I saw a post that you made that had the list of all routers that currently run your software but for the life of me, I can't find it... do you know which list I'm referring to? And one more question ... I was looking on Amazon at the Netgear AX5400 WiFi Gaming Router (XR1000) ... and I seem to be seeing what I believe are two different routers but with the same model number ... possibly... the reason why it has me puzzled is because some of their listings of that router specifically state that it runs your software and they sell for about $300 where the other listings are a $100 cheaper and don't mention your software yet the model numbers are the same ... Compare this item With this item to see what I'm talking about. AND MY QUESTION IS ... whats up with that? Do you have any idea?

Sorry ... I got side tracked in my little rant there ... my POINT in all that is that I'm trying to find the FASTEST router that currently exists that can do geo-fencing, being fully aware that it is managing a data stream for a game console ... I think really what I'm looking for is someone who's put a bunch of different routers to some real world tests with a game console then tell all of us which one they liked the best - in terms of responsiveness. And you wouldn't think people could perceive millisecond differences in packet lag but I have a friend who absolutely can ... he's kind of a freak of nature but he can pick up on things that happen in a game that I can't nor could I ever possibly ... its just a DNA thing ... and he is one of the reasons why Im trying to find the best router out there because he will most likely purchase the same router I decide on cause hes not too technically savvy and doesn't want to be bothered with the tech details and I don't want to steer him in a direction where I wasn't thorough in my homework ... he is a good friend and when it comes to gaming ... milliseconds matter - for real with him.

So one thing I've noticed over the years when it comes to edge network hardware, is that it's not really about using the CPU percentage of click cycles currently active as the measure of whether or not a router is a good performing router .... or isn't ... it's all about how quickly that CPU can process packets. And this really was more of a problem before 2010 roughly when processors really started taking off performance wise. Something few people seem to understand is that when it comes to real time Internet based applications where milliseconds matter (as they do in online gaming) ... you can have all the bandwidth in the world, but if your router can't switch those packets onto the Internet connection fast enough ... you have problems ... because you you can still only put one packet at a time on that Internet connection ... granted - with higher bandwidfth the packet reaches its destination faster and therefore you can move more packets in a given frame of time than you otherwise could with lower bandwidth ... but we don't have fancy tech to the home yet where we can run multiple isolated frequencies of light on a strand of fiber and literally with that one piece of glass, you can create hundreds ... or thousands of true parallel channels that are - in essence - physically isolated from one another just as copper is in a true parallel cable. When a router is deciding which packet gets to go first ... thats QOS ... and the reason we need QOS is because the router has to decide WHICH PACKET GOES FIRST ... because they all flow down a serial connection - one packet at a time... so when milliseconds count in an application like online gaming ... what you need is a CPU that can predict the future ... and short of that technology being real, we have to settle for the fastest CPUs we can get our hands on at a reasonable price. I don't personally find any problem at all with a quad core CPU in a home router because that means if the software it runs has been written correctly, then it can think with four "minds" simultaneously which means you can dedicate one core to outbound packets and one to inbound packets and the other two for deciding which packet goes first. THAT to me is about as effecient as we can realistically get with the Internet existing on serial connections to the home essentially... And I realize that most people don't think of Ethernet as a serial technology but it really is ... it's just really REALLY fast!

Thank you, I'm going to be upgrading my Internet service to 400 megabits this week or the next ... but that's not why im replacing my router, I'm replacing my router because it's got issues ... like it randomly bricks itself when I do upgrades on it (I run open WRT on this router ... I won't be running it on the next router I get for obvious reasons). And a router that can "run DumOS just fine" - is certainly not the answer I'm looking for. ☺ I understand your position since you work for DumaOS and you need to be vendor neutral ... I can respect that. So I'm hoping for some comments from people who actually know which routers out there that do run your OS are the fastest available in terms of real world use. It might boil down to hardware specs ... I don't know ... but I assume that each manufacturer that uses your software has pretty heavy leeway in the overall coding that goes into their product, and not all routers will perform identically in terms of responsiveness and features etc ... I don't care about WiFi because I don't game on wifi. I use ethernet for gaming ... I'm a network engineer by trade ... I would never game on wifi no matter how good they say it is, you can't beat hard copper with radio waves ... you just can't. So far, in the homework I've done for a replacement router... I've noticed that none of the newer "gaming" routers which have the 1.8 quad core CPUs and typically carry a form of a model number with AX 11000 attached to the name ... none of them seem to do geo-fencing at all ... are there issues with DumaOS and these newer hardware specs that are being put out there? I mean, I cannot fathom any router that dares to call itself a gaming router ... being unable to geo-fence since doing so seems to me to be the absolute best way to ensure the fastest possible gaming session ... the fewer router hops a packet has to make ... the better! Mike

Does anyone know which geo-fencing capable router out there is the fastest one? I need to replace my Netgear R7800 and I like the concept of geo-fencing for gaming - especially for COD; but if I'm gonna spend the money, I'd like get the best one I can get. Thanks, Mike