Is QoS important in a home network?

[velocci]

Hi all, I want to buy a switch for home use. Just wondering if i should get one with Qos. I will have two windows computers, two media streamers, a printer, xbox, AV receiver plugged into it.
thanks

 

[leo2kp]

If you have slower internet service and want to control how much bandwidth each device or service uses, then yes. Otherwise, no.

 

[velocci]

my internet service is 25Mbps I think. is that fast enough?

 

[leo2kp]

my internet service is 25Mbps I think. is that fast enough?

Depending on what you're streaming and where from, it should be fast enough. But you won't really know until you plug it all in and find out if you see any performance issues. But 25mb should be fine for something like several simultaneous Netflix streams and online gaming.

 

[bill001g]

QoS in general is a waste of time for anyone that does not control the network end to end......ie pretty much only a corporate network.

On the internet of course everyone would want their traffic to be fastest so isp do not support any of the packet marking. Now if you were overloading your upload bandwidth you could use a router to decide which packets to send and which to delay or discard. Download the ISP has already discarded traffic and by the time your router gets involved. Your router can not recreate the dropped traffic and drop something else.

Now when you talk switches even in a enterprise environment it is not needed....if it is you have a massive design problem. Switches are designed to not delay traffic so you will never have queues. If there are no queues then there is no need to select which traffic is more important it all goes out as soon as it is received. Now lets say you have a bunch of machines sending to a single server all on gig ports. If all the machines were to send data to the server at max rate you would overload the link to the server. I guess you could use QoS to fix this but the problem is more you are overloading the server link rather than some switching issue.

 

[velocci]

any recommendations for a gigabit switch that has at least 8 ports? nothing too expensive. $100 max

 

[bill001g]

Unless you are going to go managed there is very little difference between switches. Mostly it is going to be if the case is metal and if it has a internal vs a external power supply. Inside almost all these unmanaged switches are using the same asic chip that does all the work.

Unless you need something like vlan support you likely do not need a manged switch.

 

[velocci]

some switches have plastic ports and some have metal ports. does it matter?

 

[jsmithepa]

So what does one do if little Brother is torrenting, sister is Netflixting HD, Mom is downloading the library of congress. So what practical technical solution to insure I have say at least 30% of the total bandwidth for my needs? Assume ISP is what it is.

 

[bill001g]

So what does one do if little Brother is torrenting, sister is Netflixting HD, Mom is downloading the library of congress. So what practical technical solution to insure I have say at least 30% of the total bandwidth for my needs? Assume ISP is what it is.

First he is asking about a switch this needs to be done in a router. No switch will have must ability to limit traffic at that level.

Technically there is no solution especially when torrent is involved. Any solution you see are not really QoS. What they do is attempt to drop even more "bad" traffic after it has already used up the bandwidth in the hope the end machine will respond to this drop and reduce its rate of request. You are hoping that you can convince it to request enough so their is your 30% left. You have to configure it backward and limit everyone else. Still this is all dependent on either the end application or possibly the tcp window error correction to slow down. Things like torrent or anything based on UDP is almost impossible to have any influence on if it is not designed to slow down due to data loss. Torrent pretty much just opens more sessions hoping to get it the next time.