Router Bandwidth config

[Thumper66]

Hi all!

Well, I need help. Wife wants the ability to surf and so anything on the web without my PC affecting her. See, sometimes, I'm doing something and I guess I take up some of the bandwidth.

Is there a router where I can configure the bandwidth so no matter what I do, she will always have a set bandwidth set for her PC internet connection?

Thump

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

There are some newer routers that have basic "QoS/Traffic Shaping" features. You can set priority for some types of traffic. They don't do too well with splitting it up if two PCs are doing the same time of traffic. But..say one is gaming online, and the other goes to browse the web or download something...the gaming won't be affected as much...if you set gaming traffic as higher priority. DLink and Linksys have a few upper range routers with these features.

You can get much more robust with this..if you wish to build your own router using a linux distro..PFSense is one of the best, if not THE best, of the distros as far as QoS/Traffic Shaping features. I went back to using it a few months ago...because were I moved now (man I miss Comcast w/PowerBoost nudging 30 megs)....I'm stuck on 6 megs of small cable ISP bandwidth. Took Vonage with me, with 2-3 of us online..kid gaming and downloading stuff, me doing remote work, gaming, wife surfing furiously, and phone calls on Vonage..it wasn't fun.

I installed PFSense on an old IBM Thinkpad T22 I had...midrange P3, 256 megs, onboard Intel NIC, slapped in a Linksys PCMCIA NIC...fiddled with the QoS settings gave P2P traffic lowest priority, gaming and Vonage VoIP highest priority. As a quick test, I went and downloaded 3x big files at the same time...fully pegging out my 6 meg connection between the 3x simultaneous files coming down. On most routers..this would have made any other PC trying to do something on the internet quite unresponsive. I then went about web surfing...and website were snappy. They were still snappy for my wife also. I fired up Battlefield 2..and logged onto my usual server. Pings were barely 10ms higher than normal on that server...very smooth. The kid fired up his online game..same results..quite smooth.

So to sum up? You can try an off the shelf retail router..and have "some" improvement. Depending on what you do....they can help. I've read people having mixed results with them..usually it's at least "they help a bit"..but people still seem to expect more from them. Or...build yourself a little *nix router..they really are easy to build..you don't need to know linux at all...easy wizard installer holds your hand through the whole process..and you manage them through a web browser just like any other home grade router.

 

[Thumper66]

Thanks

YeOldeStonecat, thanks a lot! It helped. I may build one too. Wife's old PC can be my new router. How do you get it to have more ports for wired connection? I guess need a rough drawing(Block diagram) of the PCs, cable modem, etc setup.

My email is also: [email protected]

Thump

 

[scotty]

+1 to what stonecat says.

As he mentions, a lot of home-user routers now offer basic QoS features. I've recently picked up a DIR-655, and unless I'm mistaken, you can indeed prioritize different IP addresses, not just protocols. So in other words, you could give your wife's IP priority. Quite frankly, I imagine that should do it for you. From the few review's I've read about the 655's QoS capabilities, it works pretty well. Although I think you will have to set it up manually, because the 'auto' modes just give voip and gaming priority. Haven't had a chance to play with it too much unfortunately.

To take it one step further, pfSense is quite good, as mentioned. I haven't used it much personally beyond the occasional tinker, but from what I hear it's really solid, and I know of a few people who run pretty decent sized businesses of pfsense.

 

[thiggins]

Routers using Ubicom's StreamEngine automatic QoS do work quite well, but only for managing uplink bandwidth. The only control over downlink is to delay TCP/IP ACKs, which isn't very sophisticated. At any rate, you can't directly control application priority in the downlink direction, which is essential for throttling back bandwidth for file-sharing. D-Link uses the Ubicom processor in most of its routers.

All Linksys routers have simple priority-based bandwidth control, but again, in uplink direction only. But they allow control by the physical router switch port in addition to application ports.

One hard-to-find router that allows both up and download bandwidth control, and even allows you to dial in bandwidth instead of priority is the Edimax BR-6504n. Screenshot of QoS controls.

 

[scotty]

I'm getting more tempted to throw up pfsense at my new house... Does it handle QoS properly?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

YeOldeStonecat, thanks a lot! It helped. I may build one too. Wife's old PC can be my new router. How do you get it to have more ports for wired connection? I guess need a rough drawing(Block diagram) of the PCs, cable modem, etc setup.

My email is also: [email protected]

Thump

I used my old router...basically turned it into a switch. Old router was a Linksys RV082...an 8 port dual WAN business grade router. Had a VPN tunnel setup to the office. I made its LAN IP a high number on my internal IP range (something like 192.168.69.253)...having the PFSense box take over as .1. I disabled DHCP on the RV0.

Green NIC of my PFSense laptop plugged into one of the LAN ports of the RV0....other PCs plugged into other LAN ports, access point plugged into LAN port, nothing plugged into the WAN ports of the RV0. so the RV0 is really just running as a switch at this point.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I'm getting more tempted to throw up pfsense at my new house... Does it handle QoS properly?

I'm far from an expert on QoS. I remember trying PFSense when it first came out....reading the promises of QoS for online gaming and other users on the network not impacting you. Wasn't very solid back then. But now....I figured try it again a few versions later...and I was desparate to get Vonage sounding a little better than a cheap clock radio that fell in the fishtank...I have to say I'm impressed. You can see my ghetto home style test up above..I'd never have been able to experience that performance on the RV082 router (which itself is a very strong router...533MHz CPU and 32 megs of RAM)....nor even an old WRT54 that I slapped DD-WRT on.

Also, it's good use of an old laptop...low profile, rather quiet, low power requirements, not much heat output.

 

[mgraves]

Both pfSense and m0n0wall, from which pfSense is derived, can deal effectively with QoS & traffic shaping. It's not automatic. You need to set it up, but it works for me...and I have an unusually complex VOIP installation in my home office.

Michael