New Router -> Suddenly, Bandwidth Issues When Downloading

[pry_or]

The other week, my router died. It had been going for a few years and had recently started acting strangely, and finally it bit the dust. No big issue, I went out and bought another one the next day.

I actually bought the same model of router, albeit an updated version. I had the D-Link DIR-655 rev A3 model, and the new one is the rev B1 model. I assumed that they would perform more or less the same and they seem to basically have the same features.

I got the network running fine. I am getting the same speeds that I did on my old router, browsing is just as fast as it should be, etc. It works fine, except for when I start downloading. For whatever reason, downloads completely kill my bandwidth. I am getting the download speeds as I should, but it appears all my bandwidth is going to the download and I can't browse the internet or do any internet related tasks while the download is going. As soon as I stop or pause the download, everything works fine again.

Oh, I should also mention that this mainly happens with high speed downloads. It happens when I download through uTorrent and Steam, but not when I download through Chrome.

Here is my speedtest without downloading:

Here is my speedtest when downloading:

And here is an actual download:

As you can see, the download is fine. But it takes up most of my bandwidth.

Now, since this happened since I changed routers, I am assuming this is a router issue. I'm not too familiar with all the stuff in the setup page though and I am not sure what will fix it. The firmware is the latest version, 2.10NA.

Are there any settings I can mess with to try and fix this? I've been reading that QoS could cause issues, but isn't that mainly uploads? I have tried with WISH enabled and disabled and I don't see a different (although I haven't set any actual rules). Anything else?

 

[john-b691]

Be very careful reading the numbers. MB mean megabyte and Mb means megabit. A very rough conversion that does not include some of the overhead is to multiple by 8. So you download is taking a minimum of 2.3*8 or about 18Mb which is about what your speed test is when you are not downloading.

Your best bet if you only download on a single machine is to put QoS software on that machine to limit the download speed. There are routers that have some ability to limit the download speed but it is hit and miss how well it works. Bittorrent tends to be able to get around anything you try to do to restrict it.

 

[pry_or]

I know the difference between a MB and a Mb. That's not the issue here.

The download speed is fine, as you point out. The problem I am having is that downloading kills my overall bandwidth. I can't barely even load an internet site when I am downloading. A page loads probably once in every 10 tries. It took forever to get that speedtest while downloading. What this seems to me is that my router is prioritizing downloads completely over everything else, so all the bandwidth is going there and not to any other areas that need it, like general web browsing.

This never happened with my old router. I could download multiple things, browse the web, play games, etc., all at the same time without any hiccups. Now I can only do one thing. But the routers are the same model with the same software, so I believe there are some options somewhere that will let me fix it.

 

[john-b691]

Then your old router was not working correctly. It is suppose to not restrict any traffic from any application. How would it know what was important. I don't think your router has the correct QoS features to even attempt to fix this. You need one that allows you to hard limit the download bandwidth.

You could try to set web traffic and other things like that to priority but that is upload traffic. Maybe it will help. If not I would be looking for PC software to fix it unless you want to buy a more advanced router.