Hi Projects,
I wonder if I might have an insight into the issue you’re talking about?
The issue being that a lot of these types of devices provide their multiple LAN ports via an internal switch, which is in turn connected to the system CPU via an internal switch port at a given speed, often times at the same speed as the rest of the LAN ports provided for access to the customer.
The result of this, can be that all traffic to and from those external LAN ports, can be bottlenecked through the internal switch port, usually as a bridged interface to the CPU. Thus the result being 1 Gbit/S IN and 1 Gbit/S OUT, across that internal switch port, dictating the maximum performance across ALL of the external LAN ports if the vast majority of the traffic is routed though the CPU, rather than being switched?
Ordinarily this would not be a problem for devices like this, because the Internet connection is so often the bottleneck anyway and hosts on the LAN ports would typically be simply switched between each other, if and when they talk directly to each other and thus avoid the need for routing and traversal across the bottleneck to the CPU.
If by real gigabit port routers, you mean to say you specifically need routing between arbitrary gigabit ports and not just through the CPU to a WAN port, then what you need is a small device which has separate NICs which are not merely switch ports bridged back to the CPU.
Such a device with separate NICs, will provide unique MAC addresses for each of those NICs and depending on the system performance, may allow for arbitrary routing between each of those NICs, at or near saturation for each port.
Depends what you need. Those internal switch ports can be excellent, because they can provide full line-rate non-blocking performance between your LAN devices, if your requirement allows you to place them all on the same layer 2 network.
But if you need to route between each of those LAN side ports, then most cheap little devices will limit your options for that. Sometimes you could be a little tricky and setup VLAN trunking on the internal port and then break each LAN port out into their own VLAN, to allow for routing between ports with layer 2 separation, but this would not address the underlying performance bottleneck where the internal switch connects to the CPU.
I can think of one older device which was very cheap and very fast (line-rate saturation down to 512 byte packets, at up to 1 Mpps) at something like this, however it was only 3 port and I’m not sure how well it performs under vanilla OpenWRT. The Ubiquity UniFi EdgeRouter LITE. Seems like maybe only old new stock could be available for those also.
There’s probably something out there for you.