Can a gaming router help with high ping?

[ChloricDread29]

Hi, I play fortnite and usually can get 10-20 ping, but soon as someone else starts using the internet my ping goes to 300+ so it’s completely unplayable. I have the fastest internet I can get in my area? If I get a ‘gaming router’ or a router with quality of service, would I buy be able to stop this from happening?
Thanks

 

[anotherdrew]

Maybe. QoS really only works upstream data. If you are lagging because someone's iPhone is syncing with iCloud, then it can help. If you are lagging because someone is watching Netflix, then it won't help.

 

[bill001g]

It all depends on how much bandwidth you have to start with. It is extremely hard to manage smaller internet connections....say under 10mbps.

You can set rates in the QoS to some extent but these value are average values and you can still get burst of data. For example I send 100mbps for 1 second and do nothing for 9 seconds. Or I send 2mbps for 1 second every other second for 10 seconds. Both have average rates of 10mbps but have a very different peak load on the connection. This is hidden on large internet connections but smaller ones can not avoid it sometimes.

QoS is not some magic thing. It works ok to say limit some large download but it does not for example fix someone watching netflix. A download will just take longer if you limit it. Netflix will just not work if you limit its speed below certain values. You quickly get into the argument of whose traffic is more important.....and the answer tends to be the person that pays the bill.

 

[failboat]

only one qos was really designed for bufferbloat. fq_codel is found on edgerouter x, ddwrt, open wrt, ipfire. nearly all qos relies on a limiter to keep your pipe clear to the isp. if your connection quality is great @ 75-95% qos will work well. internet connection size doesn't matter. the only thing to worry about there is >100Mbs. then you have to run an x86 router like ipfire.

gaming uses 20-40 Kbs, all games will have low latency and takes about 5 seconds of setup. trying to set priorities for the high bandwidth stuff takes a lot of config. the default settings do a decent job. it can be toggled on/off easily, so if you want more bandwidth when not gaming you can do that.

https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/
http://burntchrome.blogspot.com/2014/05/fixing-bufferbloat-on-comcasts-blast.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-g2P3R84dw

 

[anotherdrew]

Failboat is not wrong. Some routers do a great job of managing upstream transfer rates so as not to overwhelm your internet connection. Here is the issue ... your network is fast, the internet is fast, but your link to your ISP is comparatively slow. It's the bottleneck. When networks try to shove more data through that connection than it can handle, the data has to be stored in queues (buffers) to await processing. This adds latency and is called bufferbloat. A router with a good QoS implementation (there are some pretty bad ones out there) can act as a traffic cop and manage data streams such that the upstream connection to your ISP is not overwhelmed.

The harder part is managing downstream (download) data. The "traffic cop" for this data is your ISP's router and we can not control this, but merely influence it. Through selectively dropping data packets, we can tell the servers sending data to other users that they are sending it too fast and please slow down (for more technical explanation read about the TCP protocol). While this works fairly well, it's not perfect and there are datastreams that don't listen to this slow down request (generally live media streams, VoIP, facetime, etc ... "live" stuff where repeating the data after the fact would not make sense ... for more information read about the UDP protocol). And, as Bill said, slowing down other people's data streams comes with it's own perils.

 

[failboat]

Failboat is not wrong. Some routers do a great job of managing upstream transfer rates so as not to overwhelm your internet connection. Here is the issue ... your network is fast, the internet is fast, but your link to your ISP is comparatively slow. It's the bottleneck. When networks try to shove more data through that connection than it can handle, the data has to be stored in queues (buffers) to await processing. This adds latency and is called bufferbloat. A router with a good QoS implementation (there are some pretty bad ones out there) can act as a traffic cop and manage data streams such that the upstream connection to your ISP is not overwhelmed.

The harder part is managing downstream (download) data. The "traffic cop" for this data is your ISP's router and we can not control this, but merely influence it. Through selectively dropping data packets, we can tell the servers sending data to other users that they are sending it too fast and please slow down (for more technical explanation read about the TCP protocol). While this works fairly well, it's not perfect and there are datastreams that don't listen to this slow down request (generally live media streams, VoIP, facetime, etc ... "live" stuff where repeating the data after the fact would not make sense ... for more information read about the UDP protocol). And, as Bill said, slowing down other people's data streams comes with it's own perils.

In my opinion flow queue does a much better job at fairness than fifo. fifo allows a small number, even just 1, of connections to take over your bandwidth and everything besides downloads becomes unuseable. DRR can be taken over, but not nearly as easily as fifo. htb fixes that, but it's tricky to setup. in either situation if a download takes over and makes something like netflix buffer you have to throttle it manually. with a 20Mbs connection 2-4 download tcp flows can be running in the background and you can stream in high def. with fifo that wouldn't work well at all.

if you look at the 3rd to last picture in the burntchrome link you can see htb working. at the higher priority colors go up the lower ones go down.