Routing Tests
I found the 4300's routing performance to be superb. Figure 14 shows essentially 100Mbps wire-speed performance, which puts the 4300 in the same class as the Linksys WRT54GX, Buffalo Technology WZR-RS-G54, and ASUS SL-1000 . I used Qcheck to run Response Tests, which came in as I expected at 1mSec - the lowest that Qcheck can measure.
Figure 14: Routing throughput
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The thing that sets the 4300 apart, however, is its UDP streaming performance. I fired up IxChariot and selected the IPTV v script, which emulates a Cisco IP/TV server streaming an MPEG video file. I selected the UDP protocol and ran a number of WAN-LAN tests, raising the send_data_rate script parameter each time until I started seeing lost data errors.
Figure 15: UDP streaming throughput
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Figures 15 and 16 respectively show streaming throughput and data loss for a 24Mbps stream rate. I have to confess that I haven't run this same test on any of the products that are in the same routing throughput class, so I don't know if the 4300 is unique in this performance. Nevertheless, this streaming performance is excellent and should be a match for the faster broadband connections more commonly available outside the U.S.
Figure 16: UDP streaming lost data
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Note:
IxChariot and Qcheck don't get along well with some NAT+SPI routers and the 4300 is one of them. Even when I put the LAN endpoint in DMZ, I had problems with getting tests to properly end. So I wasn't able to obtain a complete set of WAN-LAN and LAN-WAN test results using my usual test method.