Question How to Optimise Router Settings for Online Gaming?

[very_452001]

Hello,

I bought a xbox series x with game pass ultimate for my younger brother who like to play online competitively. Don't want him touching my PC lol.

I logged into my router and see these settings:

• Enable QoS
• Enable DMZ
• Address Reservation
• Airtime Fairness

Which settings above shall I enable for my xbox and in what correct order do I enable these settings and how do I do this correctly?

If I enable Airtime Fairness then will affect the other 3 settings in the above list, will Airtime Fairness effect QoS for the xbox?

 

[bill001g]

In most cases they are scamming themselves. People seem to think a bigger internet number/speed will magically make things better. You have stupid gamers who think it will somehow give them a advantage in shooter game when the game actually only uses maybe 1mbps.
This is all because people are lazy and don't want to learn say the difference between what the words bandwidth and latency mean. Not the ISP don't help them along in their delusions since the ISP makes the most profit from people that buy more internet than they actually need.

That is key to this "scam" working. If everyone only bought what they really needed the ISP would have to add even more houses to the same cable segment. They want a certain profit per segment. They need to sell lots more 100mbps plans to make the same profit

The only reason it works is there are large numbers of people that buy 1 1gbit connection and then surf the web and play games on it. The guy say who is working from home and uploading and download files from cloud servers all day is getting a great deal because his costs are basically be subsidized by all the people scamming themselves into spending more money that they really should have.

 

[bill001g]

Okay so the VPN features built in routers just allows you to remotely connect to your local network at home meaning any paid vpn service is not compatible with this feature? Routers/gateways without a vpn feature means you cannot at all connect to your home network from outside your home?

What if those teenagers use a vpn to hide their torrent activities, they can still continue?

There are 2 types of vpn. The server function which is much more common on routers and lets you remote access your house. The other is the client function and that lets your router connect to a paid service like nord or maybe someone else house or your work location.
Technically you can remote access your house without vpn it is just not a secure thing to do.

Yes if they want to go to the trouble to use vpn it can prevent them from getting banned. The problem is it is extremely hard to get a vpn service you can run huge bandwidth through. Generally the ones that can do it charge more money because it it using their resource which they have to pay someone for.
In the end either teens have no money to buy whatever it is they are stealing so they can't afford a good vpn service or you quickly realize it might just be easier to buy the stuff you are stealing rather than spend money on the vpn provider and all the hassles involved with virus etc when you torrent stuff.

 

[very_452001]

No.

Lets say there the overall pipe to your neighborhood is 5 gigabit.
You and 19 neighbors, so 20 houses.

They offer speeds of 100/100, 500/500 and 1000/1000.

5 / 20 accounts = 400megabit each, right?

No.

It is a shared resource.
If you sign up for the gigabit plan, and do a speedtest, you will see that full 1000.

If you and a couple of other neighbors, also on the gigabit plan were to do that...you 3 would also see that full gigabit performance.

Now...if ALL 20 of you were to do that same speedtest at exactly the same moment, then there would be issues.

However!!
That never happens.
The ISP knows, in great detail, how much traffic is actually used, and when.

They can oversell the neighborhood pipe, because the instances of congestion at that level is few and far between, bordering on never.

Also, marketing. All the ads you see make it seem like you need the uber speeds. 500megabits and up.
I posit that most people would be totally comfortable with a 100 megabit line.

Now, if you are routinely hosting a LAN party for a couple dozen friends, and you are all trying to download the newest game on that same residential pipe at the same time, then you might benefit from a full gigabit line.
But how many people actually do that?

Me, I have a 100/100 fiberoptic from Verizon FiOS. Just me and the wife, but we see exactly zero congestion or slowdown, in anything we do.
I could go up to a full gigabit, but there is exactly zero need.

Okay you suggest 100Mbps speed is the least minimum that most people need, any lower than this then there be slow issues? So basically the higher the Mbps the faster the downloading files will be however unlike the old days of the internet, nobody downloads now, everybody streams instead nowadays like watching the latest 4k stream on netflix instead of downloading a 100gb file of the movie. The download version is better quality than the compressed stream but the stream is more convenient and quicker.

Alright what about dedicated FTTP/FTTH fibre line directly to a house? This is dedicated, meaning not shared with the neighbourhood correct?

 

[very_452001]

There are 2 types of vpn. The server function which is much more common on routers and lets you remote access your house. The other is the client function and that lets your router connect to a paid service like nord or maybe someone else house or your work location.
Technically you can remote access your house without vpn it is just not a secure thing to do.

Yes if they want to go to the trouble to use vpn it can prevent them from getting banned. The problem is it is extremely hard to get a vpn service you can run huge bandwidth through. Generally the ones that can do it charge more money because it it using their resource which they have to pay someone for.
In the end either teens have no money to buy whatever it is they are stealing so they can't afford a good vpn service or you quickly realize it might just be easier to buy the stuff you are stealing rather than spend money on the vpn provider and all the hassles involved with virus etc when you torrent stuff.

There's this other feature in my router called IPTV/VLAN - Configure IPTV/VLAN settings if you want to enjoy IPTV or VoIP service, or if your ISP requires VLAN tags.

I watch tv channels/live tv via the app on my fire tv stick, does playing around with this IPTV setting helps with watching tv channels or helps with phone calls over wifi?

Is VLAN same as VPN?

Lastly the following router settings help with privacy at all?: Such as for example, stop the big tech giants such as Siri & Alexa Ai to gather data on the user?

• Get IP using Unicast DHCP?
• Dynamic DNS, Service Provider?
• IP & Mac Binding?

I remember the USA & UK governments before the Covid Outbreak years ago banned the Chinese Manufacturer Huawei from selling their network devices in their countries out of fear that the Chinese Government or Chinese Ai is gathering/spying data from the people in the west. From this is there any settings in the router that improves privacy for the user?

Cheers,

 

[USAFRet]

Okay you suggest 100Mbps speed is the least minimum that most people need, any lower than this then there be slow issues? So basically the higher the Mbps the faster the downloading files will be however unlike the old days of the internet, nobody downloads now, everybody streams instead nowadays like watching the latest 4k stream on netflix instead of downloading a 100gb file of the movie. The download version is better quality than the compressed stream but the stream is more convenient and quicker.

Alright what about dedicated FTTP/FTTH fibre line directly to a house? This is dedicated, meaning not shared with the neighbourhood correct?

I have FTTH, Verizon FiOS.
100/100, rock solid connection.

There is STILL a neighborhood thing.
Indeed, my neighborhood distro box is literally in my backyard, all the way down at the corner.
Verizon serves whatever bandwidth is needed to that box, NOT "unlimited".

Line from that to the back wall of my house.
I have the shortest line from that box...

Line from that across my backyard to the neighbor, and then the next neighbor, etc.

 

[bill001g]

I have no idea what they mean by IPTV in that case it has a couple definitions. VLANS do not run over the internet. They are purely something to keep data separate in a lan environment. They have almost no use in home user setup.

All those other setting are related to how you want to set things up in your house for your convenience sometimes. None of that information leaves the house.

Huawei got caught doing much worse than hacking consumer devices. They had software in cell towers they had sold that were sending data back to china. Ooops it was a mistake we left on a testing feature

FTTH does not mean dedicated. The closest you had was google and I am not sure they do it that way anymore. The technology used by almost all providers is some variation of GPON.

A single strand of fiber is run and they have optical splitters that connect to each house as it passes. The basic technology works very similar to cable. The ISP transmits everyone data down the same path mixed together but encrypted. The devices at the houses when then want to transmit request permission for a time slot to send data. All the houses technically could send data at the same time and kill each other transmission if this feature did not exist.

What I find most impressive is they use multiple color lasers so the transmit and receive are on the same fiber and they even have other color lasers for cable tv data or telephone service.

 

[very_452001]

I have no idea what they mean by IPTV in that case it has a couple definitions. VLANS do not run over the internet. They are purely something to keep data separate in a lan environment. They have almost no use in home user setup.

All those other setting are related to how you want to set things up in your house for your convenience sometimes. None of that information leaves the house.

Huawei got caught doing much worse than hacking consumer devices. They had software in cell towers they had sold that were sending data back to china. Ooops it was a mistake we left on a testing feature

FTTH does not mean dedicated. The closest you had was google and I am not sure they do it that way anymore. The technology used by almost all providers is some variation of GPON.

A single strand of fiber is run and they have optical splitters that connect to each house as it passes. The basic technology works very similar to cable. The ISP transmits everyone data down the same path mixed together but encrypted. The devices at the houses when then want to transmit request permission for a time slot to send data. All the houses technically could send data at the same time and kill each other transmission if this feature did not exist.

What I find most impressive is they use multiple color lasers so the transmit and receive are on the same fiber and they even have other color lasers for cable tv data or telephone service.

If you say the ISP transmits everyone data down the same mixed path together and this data is encrypted, does this mean no one knows this data, not even the governments, only the ISP knows how to decrypt this data?

Do you mean the laser light color of the the color of the fibres cable? Usually laser is red color yes?

Can you please enlighten me on what these router settings do for convenience?:

• Get IP using Unicast DHCP?
• Dynamic DNS, Service Provider?
• IP & Mac Binding?

Cheers,

 

[bill001g]

Pretty much only the ISP equipment can decrypt it. It is pretty standard encryption stuff. Every modem has its own unique set of encryption keys and they are changed regularly based on how much data is send and/or time. The government if they wanted it would just force the ISP to give them access via some secret court order.

In general you can't even see the light used on fiber to the home. The red color you see on some fibers can not go enough distance. Not sure why they call it color when your eyes can't see it.. I guess it is easier than always saying 1310nm,1490nm, and 1550nm which are the common ones used. The red ones you can see are around 850nm

Unicast dhcp is just a slightly different way for the router to get the wan ip from the ISP. Many times the ISP does not support this.

You only need dynamic DNS if you are hosting some kind of server or incoming session.

IP mac binding only matters if you are doing static IP reservations.

None of this is security related it is purely based on some need for some feature.

 

[very_452001]

Can I apply IP mac binding to the xbox to reserve an ip address for it?

 

[bill001g]

If you want you will have to read the manual for the details. It most times someplace on one of the dhcp panels

 

[very_452001]

Okay cheers for the helpful replies

 

[nigelivey]

This is starting to sound like network 101........