Question Does QOS service differ on a normal vs gaming router?

[Cy3bey Odyssey]

I was wondering does the QOS on some of these "gaming" routers like the ASUS RT-AC5300 for example actually make any kind of difference over a normal style QOS on a non gaming router?

 

[bill001g]

It depends on how much effort you want to put in and what router you are comparing it to. Obviously many cheap router have worthless QoS implementations. But lets say you loaded the merlin firmware into a asus router and compared that to a similar router with the so called "gaming" features.

The main difference really is someone spent time putting in menus of games and identifying ports used by common games. The QoS itself is the same it tries to guarantee some minimum bandwidth for that traffic. If you can identify the traffic yourself you can put in the same so called guarantee.

QoS in general on a internet router is pretty much a joke. You can really only control the outbound traffic and in most cases the problem is inbound..ie download. The ISP is in control of what is sent and what is discarded. You can do nothing to get the ISP to say drop web data and give you game data. By the time your router sees anything the data is gone and you can not just tell the ISP to send you the other data.

The only reason it even partially works is you attempt trick the clients of traffic you do not want favor into requesting less traffic. You toss away traffic you actually received from the internet and hope the client will react to that loss and slow down its rate of requests. The only reason it even works is most applications do slow down. It does nothing on applications that send at a fixed rate or respond to loss by opening even more sessions....ie torrent. If it was this simple you could stop DDOS with QoS which obviously you can't since by the time you get the data your connection has been overloaded. Throwing away the traffic does not mean the sender will not keep sending it.

 

[failboat]

only two qdisc work well. fq_codel and cake. fq_codel is on the ERX, ipfire, asus wrt. cake is on openwrt. The ERX is a $50 router and handles 100Mbs connections.
They are great for sharing the connection at home with other people. cake is newer, but it does the same thing. it's better for dsl and it can run at higher rates on low end stuff.

You do have to limit yourself in order for the qdisc to work, but it's 5-15%. you cant use 100% of what the isp gives you and have low latency no matter which way you shape.

I feel it's a good trade off to go from 100 to 90Mbs and have all your small connections get serviced. getting gaming bufferbloat to go away requires you to adjust the limiter and that's it. check dslreports bufferbloat test to make sure it's working. You generally start around 85% and keep increasing it as long as you keep A+ bufferbloat. most implementations already take 5% out by default.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-g2P3R84dw

 

[Cy3bey Odyssey]

My issue is I also have IPTV service to set up on a router and I dont' have alot of knowledge on advanced setup

 

[bill001g]

It depends on your bandwidth if you have say 100mbps or more you likely can do nothing and it will all work fine. QoS only matters if you are trying to use more bandwidth than you purchase it does nothing if there are no data queues.

For smaller connections it is not hard to exceed the bandwidth when you consider 4k netflix can eat 25 mbps. You need to first get some idea what kinds of traffic are running in your house and what is important. QoS is just a set of rules that enforces what is more important. In your case you have IPTV and in other houses it might be be the 4k netflix stream even if that means nobody else can use the internet.

You really need to first see how much issues you actually have and if maybe a better internet connection would be the best solution. QoS is not magic it does not create more bandwidth it just picks which person get the crappy performance or no access.

 

[jsmithepa]

My issue is I also have IPTV service to set up on a router and I dont' have alot of knowledge on advanced setup

I suggest u take a closer look to that gaming router ^above.

Vendors make QOS (half-baked implementations) difficult (to configure).

But basic QOS gist is: give u a bunch of queues (traffic lanes) with service priority, and you tell it which traffic type goes into what queue.

 

[Cy3bey Odyssey]

I suggest u take a closer look to that gaming router ^above.

Vendors make QOS (half-baked implementations) difficult (to configure).

But basic QOS gist is: give u a bunch of queues (traffic lanes) with service priority, and you tell it which traffic type goes into what queue.

Well I will try a ERX setup and see what happens tho if I did not need to VLAN tag for the IPTV I would not care, however to do so with ERX looks super complex.

 

[nigelivey]

Traffic shaping on Pfsense works very well but as stated above, QOS is generally BS, if you are not hitting your total available bandwidth it causes more harm than good!

 

[Cy3bey Odyssey]

Traffic shaping on Pfsense works very well but as stated above, QOS is generally BS, if you are not hitting your total available bandwidth it causes more harm than good!

I was looking at things like ipfire, and Pfsense but it was my understanding they could not be flashed directly on to a wireless router.

 

[nigelivey]

I was looking at things like ipfire, and Pfsense but it was my understanding they could not be flashed directly on to a wireless router.

No, but you could re-task an old PC as long as you have 2 x NICs installed.

 

[bill001g]

Before you go way off on a tangent first you need to see if you actually have a problem. IPTV like almost every other video system uses buffers to solve internet issues. On forums like this you see people constantly scream bufferbloat bufferbloat.... Everything except games actually likes bufferbloat. It lets you keep extra data in the ISP network. This is why the ISP make no effort to reduce bufferbloat since it actually helps most users. Video applications themselves then buffer even more data on the client.

In most cases unless you have severely overloaded your internet connection you will not see delays or buffering in video.

If you are having video issues then you first must identify what traffic other than the video is causing this problem because you are going to have to limit it. It maybe simpler to limit it in the application. It tends to work much better to limit something like steam downloads in the steam client, limiting it in qos will sometimes cause things like steam to completely stop and then you must restart it by hand.

In many cases it tends to be easier to manage the traffic at the source than use fancy QoS implementations. It is all pretty much the same thing you are just doing the limitation in different places. Good QoS is actually hard to setup. The click a box and it magically works is only good for the narrow case where you only care about gaming traffic and nothing else. Everything else you must tell the router what is important and how important it really is.

 

[Cy3bey Odyssey]

Before you go way off on a tangent first you need to see if you actually have a problem. IPTV like almost every other video system uses buffers to solve internet issues. On forums like this you see people constantly scream bufferbloat bufferbloat.... Everything except games actually likes bufferbloat. It lets you keep extra data in the ISP network. This is why the ISP make no effort to reduce bufferbloat since it actually helps most users. Video applications themselves then buffer even more data on the client.

In most cases unless you have severely overloaded your internet connection you will not see delays or buffering in video.

If you are having video issues then you first must identify what traffic other than the video is causing this problem because you are going to have to limit it. It maybe simpler to limit it in the application. It tends to work much better to limit something like steam downloads in the steam client, limiting it in qos will sometimes cause things like steam to completely stop and then you must restart it by hand.

In many cases it tends to be easier to manage the traffic at the source than use fancy QoS implementations. It is all pretty much the same thing you are just doing the limitation in different places. Good QoS is actually hard to setup. The click a box and it magically works is only good for the narrow case where you only care about gaming traffic and nothing else. Everything else you must tell the router what is important and how important it really is.

Well the issue that is going on is when someone (friend or relative) hooks on to my wifi any online game I am playing starts to lag it is my understand that QOS or its more advanced cousins do is to prioritize my connection over anyone else to stop any kind of lag from happening

 

[bill001g]

You have now changed things. You were talking IPTV and now you are talking gaming. It takes a different configuration for those. Gaming only requires a small amount of data but it does not tolerate buffering. Video tolerates buffers and actually uses them but need huge bandwidth.

How much bandwidth do you have to start with. How much bandwidth do you think your friends are using. They need to use a large percentage to impact your connection.

If you are using wifi and it is their wifi traffic competing with yours that you can't fix. The QoS is only used on the WAN side of the router. The junk you see in the wifi setting related to QoS is some special stuff for broadcast and multicast traffic that nobody really uses.

In any case you do not need a special router if you just want to favor traffic from your 1 machine. Most tplink and asus routers on factory firmware have the ability to give a certain machine a min amount of both upload and download bandwidth. It works ok but you tend to have to set this number a bit high because of how the average is calculated. You likely could just try a simple reservation for your projected maximum IPTV bandwidth for all traffic for your IP address. It is simpler than trying to do each application. The times you need really fancy QoS is if you had multiple machines and only wanted certain application on each.

 

[Cy3bey Odyssey]

You have now changed things. You were talking IPTV and now you are talking gaming. It takes a different configuration for those. Gaming only requires a small amount of data but it does not tolerate buffering. Video tolerates buffers and actually uses them but need huge bandwidth.

How much bandwidth do you have to start with. How much bandwidth do you think your friends are using. They need to use a large percentage to impact your connection.

If you are using wifi and it is their wifi traffic competing with yours that you can't fix. The QoS is only used on the WAN side of the router. The junk you see in the wifi setting related to QoS is some special stuff for broadcast and multicast traffic that nobody really uses.

In any case you do not need a special router if you just want to favor traffic from your 1 machine. Most tplink and asus routers on factory firmware have the ability to give a certain machine a min amount of both upload and download bandwidth. It works ok but you tend to have to set this number a bit high because of how the average is calculated. You likely could just try a simple reservation for your projected maximum IPTV bandwidth for all traffic for your IP address. It is simpler than trying to do each application. The times you need really fancy QoS is if you had multiple machines and only wanted certain application on each.

The only reason I had mentioned IPTV at all is because other people were talking about getting these "fancy" switches and routers and I did not want to loose my IPTV service when I went to attempt to set one up.

Right now I have a 1gb/s connection, I am not sure how much they are actually using I am on a wired connection but when ever anyone is on my wifi my games lag. As you can tell I really don't know much about the finer points of networking. I just figured QoS would take care of my issue, or at least that's how it is advertised.

 

[bill001g]

The only way you have issue on a gigabit connection is if someone is running torrents. You should never overload the connection so you should never need QoS

Be careful just turning the QoS feature on may bottleneck the router. Even the very fastest gaming routers can not keep up with a gigabit connection when you have firewall or QoS features on. The router is dependent on a hardware offload NAT funciton to be able to run at gigabit speeds. If you use many features this hardware is turned off and CPU must do the nat and all the other functions.

There is no way to fix the wifi problems which is why everything you will find says to play online game on ethernet. Wifi is subject to interference from neighbors as well as other users in your house. There is no central control of wifi devices they all do their best to not transmit over the top of each other. There really is nothing the router can do about this the signals are being damaged in the air between the end device and the router. There is talk in the next generation of wifi it will work more like cell phones where the router controls the traffic. This is many years away though.

So your primary goal is not QoS it is to find a way to not use wifi. Powerline units tend to be the best option for gamers.

 

[Cy3bey Odyssey]

The only way you have issue on a gigabit connection is if someone is running torrents. You should never overload the connection so you should never need QoS

Be careful just turning the QoS feature on may bottleneck the router. Even the very fastest gaming routers can not keep up with a gigabit connection when you have firewall or QoS features on. The router is dependent on a hardware offload NAT funciton to be able to run at gigabit speeds. If you use many features this hardware is turned off and CPU must do the nat and all the other functions.

There is no way to fix the wifi problems which is why everything you will find says to play online game on ethernet. Wifi is subject to interference from neighbors as well as other users in your house. There is no central control of wifi devices they all do their best to not transmit over the top of each other. There really is nothing the router can do about this the signals are being damaged in the air between the end device and the router. There is talk in the next generation of wifi it will work more like cell phones where the router controls the traffic. This is many years away though.

So your primary goal is not QoS it is to find a way to not use wifi. Powerline units tend to be the best option for gamers.

ok thanks for the help, I will just prioritize my wired LAN connection to my PC over everything else on the network and I won't need to go spend allot of money on some "gaming" router when just about any decent one can do that for me. That seems to be my best option if I understand what everyone is telling me.

 

[bill001g]

ok thanks for the help, I will just prioritize my wired LAN connection to my PC over everything else on the network and I won't need to go spend allot of money on some "gaming" router when just about any decent one can do that for me. That seems to be my best option if I understand what everyone is telling me.

This may sound simple but I suspect you will actually hurt your overall performance. As soon as you run any feature that requires the router to examine data all traffic must pass the CPU chip. This moves all the NAT function back to the CPU from the hardware assist. Your maximum speed on your network will likely drop to 250-300mbps. That is a huge drop for someone who is paying for gigabit internet.

I used to play with all kinds of fun router features that were in third party images. As soon as a got a internet connection over 200mbps I pretty much use the box as a dumb media converter.

 

[failboat]

ok thanks for the help, I will just prioritize my wired LAN connection to my PC over everything else on the network and I won't need to go spend allot of money on some "gaming" router when just about any decent one can do that for me. That seems to be my best option if I understand what everyone is telling me.

You can't run any type of queue based shaping on 1Gbs unless you get an x86 cpu router. queue based shaping only works if it's buffering at your router. so when you have weakpoints on clients (wifi, powerline, anything not wired really) or if the ISP isn't giving you a consistent 1Gbs, then it won't shape.

You might want to spend some time making sure you don't have weakness in your own network. check to see if you get 1Gbs where you expect to. with that much speed you shouldn't really be having any problems. that's enough bandwidth for hundreds of people.