most likely because this device is mainly for wifi use, and/or limitation of the SoC.

You want your $90 wi-fi router to do what now?

That's amazing, for software to be able to cause that!

Thank you for your sacrifice.

Which router did you go for, by the way?

Most of those run OpenWrt or PfSense. Assuming the hardware is well-supported by the open source software it runs, there's a argument to be made that there's no difference. There's always the risk of them using some weird chipset that won't be supported in a year's time. The only difference is that the OpenWrt One is specifically designed for OpenWrt with well-supported hardware.

Packet loss occurs when a router has to drop some packets because the buffer to store them is running out because the link where they are supposed to go is overloaded.

Bufferbloat is the issue where you make your queues too deep, i.e. you allocate too much RAM to buffering, while the cause of the buffering still exists, so the deeper queue just fills up anyway, so you haven't improved anything, and have induced extra latency on the packets that do make it trough.

Deep buffers can help in situations where you have a step down in link speed, but only bursty and not sustained overloading of the slower output link.

The big bottleneck in router hardware is more about TCAM or HBM memory used to store the FIB of the global routing table. Since the table has grown so much the devices with less high speed memory can't hold the table anymore, and if they start swapping the FIB to normal memory your routing performance goes to shit.

So not all of your concerns seem to apply to this class of device, but of course you're right, The Register should have mentioned the RAM.

1GB

The LAN and WAN ports aren't labelled as such on the device and can be configured to do anything. The 2.5Gb port can also be used to take in PoE so for a lot of people - myself included - this will be the only port that's actually used, or at least the port that will be used the heaviest. The reason, I think, that it's configured as WAN by default is so that the LAN port can be used to plug a laptop in directly without disconnecting the whole network.

Tranfering between devices on the LAN.

Edit: Wait, no, it's the other way around. 2.5 on WAN, and just a single 1GB LAN port. That absolutely doesn't make sense.

It's just the router, I guess. Provide your own switch for more ports.

It says its a BananaPi product, and BananaPi uses aliexpress as a distributor according to https://www.banana-pi.org/web/index.php?topclassid=155&classid=155&lanstr=en&wap=1

checks out afaik

You can hook it to a switch and a Wireless AP.. Now your networking is modular.