Any consumer router than can handle 100mbps+ with QoS on?

[alkemyst]

Even if you live alone nothing is really solo use anymore. You've got streaming media, downloads, browsing, gaming etc all competing for bandwidth. When steam or a console or whatever decides to randomly start downloading a patch, that could be a few GB of activity that you didn't even initiate. Even on my 100mbps connection I can tell if my wife starts a Netflix stream while I'm gaming or using FaceTime, I'll start to get lots of random lag spikes, because even if it's just a 10mbps stream it doesn't come in at a steady pace. It buffers for a few seconds up front then periodically saturates the connection every minute or so to fill it back up. Even when I'm just web browsing it's still noticeably faster with QoS because I can prioritize the TCP control packets and keep latency to a minimum.

Well that's the key thing a multiple user home.

Unless you have bandwidth issues streaming and voice/video shouldn't be having issues to run together.

It may have more to do with the CPU power of the device though. I am running a Cisco 819 ISR and have 5 people all doing things from streaming, console, online gaming, facetime is big for some, and I never see hiccups on my cable modem connection. My speedtests will drop considerably in high usage, but that is bandwidth's limitations.

 

[BD2003]

Well that's the key thing a multiple user home.



Unless you have bandwidth issues streaming and voice/video shouldn't be having issues to run together.



It may have more to do with the CPU power of the device though. I am running a Cisco 819 ISR and have 5 people all doing things from streaming, console, online gaming, facetime is big for some, and I never see hiccups on my cable modem connection. My speedtests will drop considerably in high usage, but that is bandwidth's limitations.

I'm not having bandwidth issues, it's just the latency spikes I'm trying to control. Any time I start a TCP download it just floods the connection and if I keep a ping window open I can see the RTT spike from 20ms to the triple digits with the occasional lost packets. It's direct cause and effect. It translates to little stutters in game and corruption during facetime.

If I use QoS and limit the HTTP ports to use only 90% of the connection, you literally wouldn't even know when the download started by monitoring the pings and everything is butter smooth.

 

[azazel1024]

Even if you live alone nothing is really solo use anymore. You've got streaming media, downloads, browsing, gaming etc all competing for bandwidth. When steam or a console or whatever decides to randomly start downloading a patch, that could be a few GB of activity that you didn't even initiate. Even on my 100mbps connection I can tell if my wife starts a Netflix stream while I'm gaming or using FaceTime, I'll start to get lots of random lag spikes, because even if it's just a 10mbps stream it doesn't come in at a steady pace. It buffers for a few seconds up front then periodically saturates the connection every minute or so to fill it back up. Even when I'm just web browsing it's still noticeably faster with QoS because I can prioritize the TCP control packets and keep latency to a minimum.

Don't know what to tell you. What kind of modem? Maybe an issue with the router?

I have a 75/75 FIOS connection and it takes a LOT for me to notice when the connection is getting hammered. I can run a couple of netflix streams, facetime, a BIG (and fast) download and online gaming all at the same time and everything stays nice and low latency and bandwidth gets shared around mostly pretty fairly.

 

[BD2003]

It's mostly that I've got super high standards, little blips that bother me probably go unnoticed by most. I mean, it works fine without QoS, it's just a noticeable improvement at times with it.

For what it's worth I ended up finding a stripped version of tomato for my E3000 that is capable of controlling the 100mbps connection, but just barely.

 

[ButtMagician]

Well, if I had 100/100 or higher symmetrical, I probably wouldn't bother with QoS. My ISP only gives me 10mbps upload though. It's easy to fill it with torrent uploads or w/e.

Anyway, some browsing of Tomato forums revealed that new versions of Tomato mods have ingress QoS implemented, courtesy of Toastman. This is actually something I don't want, given 100mbps download and the fact that QoS for incoming traffic seems less reliable. If there was an option to disable it, perhaps the performance would come back to that of the earlier versions.

 

[alkemyst]

Well, if I had 100/100 or higher symmetrical, I probably wouldn't bother with QoS. My ISP only gives me 10mbps upload though. It's easy to fill it with torrent uploads or w/e.

Anyway, some browsing of Tomato forums revealed that new versions of Tomato mods have ingress QoS implemented, courtesy of Toastman. This is actually something I don't want, given 100mbps download and the fact that QoS for incoming traffic seems less reliable. If there was an option to disable it, perhaps the performance would come back to that of the earlier versions.

Yeah, uploads if streaming will bring your download speeds to the same rate.

On DSL if you have a lot of uploaders on your 'neighborhood pipe' that could really mess things up as well.

 

[azazel1024]

I probably would need to run QoS too if I had a much slower connection.

At any rate, am I going to notice a few miliseconds of extra lag? No, not really. That said, I DO/will notice if it starts spiking above about 10ms or so [extra] and it does not with my connection and my usage, even when hammering on it.

Whether that is just my router being better at things, or FIOS handling things a bit better on their end, no idea.

 

[XavierMace]

I don't know what to say. I've got a 130/60 connection. At any one time we've typically got 3 people playing MMO's, 1 person watching Netflix, and one or two people heavily downloading torrents. When I say heavily, I mean we've done 320Gb in a day. I haven't run into any latency issues or packet loss and I'm not running any QOS settings.

If one person starting up Netflix is having that kind of effect on your connection, there's something wrong.

Either that, or home routers have gotten far crappier than when I used them. In which case, I recommend again using pfSense.

 

[Lorne]

Set another router up as a access point for the rest of the household and choke it to 10/10or what ever you set it, then you stay hardwired to the main.

 

[BD2003]

Could it be something my ISP is doing? Theoretically if they were doing a lot of buffering on their end, I could see how that could cause a delay for little UDP packets when there's a flood of big TCP packets that are backing up the pipe.

 

[BD2003]

Set another router up as a access point for the rest of the household and choke it to 10/10or what ever you set it, then you stay hardwired to the main.

Hmm...actually, maybe it could work if I limited the WAN to connect using a 100mbps ethernet link...but how can I even do that? I don't think you can just put a 100mbps switch between your modem and your router like that, right? Doesn't the router need to connect directly to the modem?

 

[Lorne]

I was thinking
Modem
l
router - your puter
l
switch/AP - everyone else.

I know some have speed control but most people never even look that setting over, And I am just going off of the top of my head thinking I have seen this before.
Worth a try maybe.

 

[XavierMace]

Hmm...actually, maybe it could work if I limited the WAN to connect using a 100mbps ethernet link...but how can I even do that? I don't think you can just put a 100mbps switch between your modem and your router like that, right? Doesn't the router need to connect directly to the modem?

Depends on your setup. My modem hooks directly into my switch. But I have a rather abnormal setup.

 

[Harrod]

Most ISP's don't apply QOS to the customers interface unless they are running voice or asking that it is turned on as part of a service, so you can flag traffic the way you want on your lan, but once it gets up to the edge router it's treated the same way as any other traffic.

I will go ahead and say that I work for a large ISP, and troubleshoot VoIP issues most of the day. I've also spent about 5 years troubleshooting DSL and Cable modem issues. Many DSLAMs are no longer feed by T1 spans that are bundled into IMA groups or DS3's and are now using Ethernet on the uplink.

One of the biggest issues I've seen with DSL and slow speeds is actually caused by local loop issues(corrosion at the NID and the cable between the DSLAM and the Customers premise.) People tend to want to blame the network, but not suspect the copper pair in the ground is the culprit, some of this stuff has been in the ground for more than 50 years.

Typical traffic patterns for DSL show that utilization on the upstream port from a DSLAM is typically 10 to 30% of the download speeds, with it usually being closer to 10%.

 

[BD2003]

I was thinking

Modem

l

router - your puter

l

switch/AP - everyone else.



I know some have speed control but most people never even look that setting over, And I am just going off of the top of my head thinking I have seen this before.

Worth a try maybe.

Yeah I don't think I have any with speed control.

 

[JackMDS]

http://www.netlimiter.com/

 

[PliotronX]

X86 with pfsense gets my vote.