Linksys WRT1900AC Media Prioritization

[thiggins]

I am not seeing many comments about this feature on the WRT. Has anyone tried it? Not interesting?

 

[sfx2000]

I would agree - since many folks have made an issue that Client/Application settings that some vendors incorrectly identify as Quality of Service.

Media Prioritization/Traffic Shaping is done at the application layer - QoS is at the MAC layer, FWIW...

While the WRT1900ac has very limited manual tweaking for app/client prioritization, much less QoS values (which shouldn't be touched, IMHO), it does offer some fairly strong traffic shaping capabilities - just displayed in a way that is less than approachable.

One of the challenges here is that it's pretty hard to objectively quantify the effect of the "Media Prioritization" settings - but it's fairly easy to set up once you understand the screen/menus.

sfx

 

[bobiii]

wrt1900ac Media Prioritizations

I just purchased one from Best Buy, yesterday. Setup was ok. A little confusing since they insist on taking you by the hand. Great for beginners. I'm not exactly an expert but I do like to play around. I did try this media prioritization but decided it wasn't for me.
I had setup my ooma telo to have high priority. There are only 2 levels as far as I can see. Normal priority and High priority. I setup the ooma telo at the high priority in order to get the best voice quality. I should also mention that I have Time Warner with 100 megs down and 5 up. When I did my speed test at www.speedtest.com I got my usual 112/5.6. After turning on prioritization I noticed that my normal connection dropped to 28/5! It didn't matter what time of the day it was. i turned off prioritization and everything was back to normal. I need to find out if I'm doing something wrong or the software is not up to par yet.

 

[chadster766]

How Linksys Media Prioritization works:

- Downstream bandwidth is the maximum amount of bandwidth your ISP provides you.

- Devices listed a High Priority will be given what they require from the Downstream bandwidth.

- Devices listed as Low Priority are given what bandwidth is left over after the High Priority devices.

- All devices never exceed the Downstream bandwidth maximum. So if you set it at 512 kbps all devices regardless of their priority will never get more that 512 kbps.

 

[sm00thpapa]

25 devices connected to this router and I feel I don't need to use this feature.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[chadster766]

25 devices connected to this router and I feel I don't need to use this feature.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Yes I think a standard QOS feature would have been a better choice.

Linksys Media Prioritization benefits people who really want high quality Netflix or other streaming media on devices regardless what others on the network are doing.

 

[stevech]

IP layer based ooma and similar VoIP (excluding cable TV's digital phone because it has priority via the DOCSIS scheduler - layer 1.5) - is constrained by the upstream latency and delay. In Cable DOCSIS in the busy hours, this is the quality issue.

Having 100/5 service brute force cures many ills. But what does that cost? I'd love to have it. But my crummy 15/1 is $50 / mo here in this TWC monopoly region.

 

[sfx2000]

Yes I think a standard QOS feature would have been a better choice.

Linksys Media Prioritization benefits people who really want high quality Netflix or other streaming media on devices regardless what others on the network are doing.

Standards Based Quality of Service is fully supported and automatic for the WRT1900ac - and from my review of the Attribute-Value Pairs, they're set pretty well...

Goes back to my earlier post - Media Prioritization as SmartWIFI calls it, this is traffic shaping - and this is also what some folks confuse with Quality of Service.

sfx

 

[jlake]

Don't be afraid to experiment. You can also try setting the up/down values to zero (as described in link below). Or you can try letting the router try to figure it out automatically. Or lastly, you can enter your user defined ISP values. Use whatever works best for you.

http://community.linksys.com/t5/Wireless-Routers/EA6500-BECOMES-SLOW-THE-INTERNET/m-p/606244#M249993

 

[chadster766]

Standards Based Quality of Service is fully supported and automatic for the WRT1900ac - and from my review of the Attribute-Value Pairs, they're set pretty well...

Goes back to my earlier post - Media Prioritization as SmartWIFI calls it, this is traffic shaping - and this is also what some folks confuse with Quality of Service.

sfx

sfx2000,

I don't see how you could do a standard QOS rule to reserve say 20kb/s for a critical service like a voip device with the Media Prioritization feature of the WRT1900AC.

You could put a voip device to as high priority in Media Prioritization but it's not reserved. If you have another high priority device using streaming media it will take all it can and leave what left for the critical service. Media Prioritization is quite different from standard QOS.

 

[Razor512]

I wish a company would develop a new type of QOS that can dynamically throttle.

Currently QOS tends to reserve a percentage of bandwidth , so for example if you have a connection that can consistently provide exactly 50mbit/s upload and download, if you input exactly 50 into the QOS, then the speed will drop to around 48mbit/s or some other random speed that is close to what you entered but a little lower.

And then if you start playing with the QOS settings by entering higher speeds until it no longer drops the speed, you then get ineffective QOS.

Why cant someone make something similar to application priorities in windows task manager where regardless of priority, all applications have the ability to use the full speed of the CPU, but if a higher priority task requests CPU time, it will give it as much as it wants, leaving any excess for the low priority ones.

Why cant they just implement something like that for network priorities?

 

[chadster766]

I wish a company would develop a new type of QOS that can dynamically throttle.

Currently QOS tends to reserve a percentage of bandwidth , so for example if you have a connection that can consistently provide exactly 50mbit/s upload and download, if you input exactly 50 into the QOS, then the speed will drop to around 48mbit/s or some other random speed that is close to what you entered but a little lower.

And then if you start playing with the QOS settings by entering higher speeds until it no longer drops the speed, you then get ineffective QOS.

Why cant someone make something similar to application priorities in windows task manager where regardless of priority, all applications have the ability to use the full speed of the CPU, but if a higher priority task requests CPU time, it will give it as much as it wants, leaving any excess for the low priority ones.

Why cant they just implement something like that for network priorities?

I believe that is the ideology of Linksys Media Prioritization. Please see my explanation of the feature near the beginning of this thread

 

[htismaqe]

Enterprise routers have that - it's called priority queueing or in Cisco LLQ.

Anything assigned to the low-latency queue takes strict priority over all of the other traffic classes.

As for why enabling QoS seems to lower your total bandwidth, that's by design.

One, the QoS schema allows for protocol overhead at each layer of the OSI model and two, you never want to allocate 100% of your bandwidth to a traffic class otherwise essential service like routing updates and the like could get dropped.

 

[thiggins]

I wish a company would develop a new type of QOS that can dynamically throttle.

Qualcomm also has StreamBoost, which incorporates technology acquired along with BigFoot Networks.

See this post and Does Qualcomm's StreamBoost Really Work?

 

[RMerlin]

Why cant someone make something similar to application priorities in windows task manager where regardless of priority, all applications have the ability to use the full speed of the CPU, but if a higher priority task requests CPU time, it will give it as much as it wants, leaving any excess for the low priority ones.

AFAIK, this is how QOS works in Tomato/Asuswrt (and probably many others). Linux's traffic classification is used to determine the max throughput of a certain type of traffic - provided there is no higher priority traffic going on at the same time.

A few years ago I tested it by having a rule set to give a lower priority to FTP traffic. I started an FTP transfer, and saw it hit my full WAN speed. As soon I started an HTTP download, the FTP speed dropped to what I had allocated in my QoS settings.

 

[Razor512]

The issue I have is that it never works quite as smoothly as setting priorities for CPU time

 

[RMerlin]

The issue I have is that it never works quite as smoothly as setting priorities for CPU time

Part of the problem is that you can only truly control egress traffic. Inbound traffic isn't directly under your control, aside from throttling the rate at which you send back ACK packets, which gives you some limited control over it.

 

[htismaqe]

Yep.

Network QoS, like most things in a network, is only as good as it's weakest link.

The only time I've really found QoS functions useful is when running VoIP over an uplink smaller than 768K, for example. You want to use egress QoS with fragmentation and interleaving so that you can deliver voice packets in a predictable, deterministic manner.

Downstream QoS on an Internet connection is all but useless IMO.

 

[FattysGoneWild]

I was noticing in my settings with my WRT1900AC. Running latest firmware version btw. I also use the local login in settings and not smart wifi. Any ways. I noticed this even in the manual. It shows that you can set downstream and upstream? Yet mine only shows downstream? I am on 100mb/5mb cable internet connection. Those numbers I did not put in myself. I guess the router did. Picture attached. My main concern is giving my Ooma Telo phone highest priority. Maybe I don't even need it though as my connection is pretty fast? Also please note. Just for giggles. I decided to turn in on and throw Ooma at highest priority. I then done a speed test. It capped my download to about 96mb down. When I usually test between 100mb-102mb. Not a huge difference. But, is this to be expected? Like I said earlier. I did not touch the numbers that was already filled in by the router. I also turned it back off for now. Pending more information on this. And I hit my 100mb+ that is slightly over just fine again.

 

[FattysGoneWild]

Anyone might know the answer to this?