Help with Netgear AC1900: Limit bandwidth used by iOS devices

[Thorz]

I have an ADSL 15/1 mbit/s connection at home that I cannot change as there is nothing better offered in this area.

I have a problem. We have 5 iOS devices (iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch). When any of them gets connected to power iOS automatically starts to run iCloud backup if it has not been run during the last 24 hours, something that is fine. The problem is that the iCloud backup process eats all the upload bandwidth I have, my ping times go as high as 3000ms when iCloud backup is running testing against a close and reliable server that normally answers at 30ms!

I do not want to do anything to the iOS devices, what I want is to set some limitations to them at router level.

As I have an old 802.11n modem/router provided by my ISP I have bought a Netgear AC1900 R7000 to take care of the routing on my network.

At the beginning my main goal was to upgrade to something that could let me use the 5Ghz band to connect my Macbook Pro as the 2.4Ghz band at this place is really crowded by the neighbors. I was going to leave the iOS devices on the 2.4Ghz band and set another SSID to use it specially by my laptop on the 5Ghz band. But now I am thinking that I want to:

1. Isolate the iOS devices on a separate network (VLAN?) and limit the upload bandwidth of this network to max 400kbps. This will always guarantee 600kbps to my laptop network when an iOS device is running iCloud backup on its network.
2. I want that when there is no use on the iOS network the hole 1mbps upload channel can be used by my laptop on its own network.
3. Add a 3rd guest network with limited resources (max 300kbps up / 1mbps down).
4. Activate QoS for all the networks so it can help with prioritization of important traffic specially when iCloud backup is running.

How can I achieve this with my current setup? I could install a 3rd party firmware like Tomato or something like that if needed but I would like to try it with the firmware from the fabricant first if possible.

Any other ideas about modifying my setup are totally welcome.

Thank you for the help.

 

[sfx2000]

Might consider that limiting the bandwidth of the iDevices just means that it will take much longer for them to back up, and this will interfere even more with your network performance on the other devices.

 

[Thorz]

The problem is that on average every device takes something like 10 minutes to back up to iCloud, and this is 10 minutes that the internet connection is been totally killed by this sole device, and there are 5 iOS devices at home.
I have to always start to search who has connected his/her device and ask them to turn off the WiFi, something that is becoming really tedious.
I don't care if 400kbps are been eaten by the iDevices during an hour or more. Normally it is just one or two that get connected while I am needing the bandwidth.
Do you recommend other kind of strategy? A good QoS strategy and the same network for everybody could also work, but I don't know how capable is the Netgear dealing with shaping the kind of traffic produces by these iCloud backups.

 

[sfx2000]

The problem is that on average every device takes something like 10 minutes to back up to iCloud, and this is 10 minutes that the internet connection is been totally killed by this sole device, and there are 5 iOS devices at home.

Something wrong here - if a device takes 10 minutes every time to do the backup to icloud...

Another option is to do WiFi sync to iTunes locally on the LAN/WLAN, and that is very fast, less than a minute...

(note, while I'm a Mac/IOS user, I don't use iCloud for much at all... mostly due to security/privacy concerns, along with potential privacy issues - and then there's the whole 3G/4G usage when not at home...)