What are my options to manage online connection with "Sky" router? Gaming issue.

[Lieto]

Good day dear community,
I came here in search for wisdom.

I believe my problem is quite common but i am not sure if there is a solution to it.
To start with i live in London UK and fiber isn't available where i live yet, so my Upload/Download is a really modest 0.6/3M, this is on "black box" standard Sky router.

It is perfectly enough to casually play games like League of Legends (dota) with a ping of 35 and a steady connection, no issues at all. Problems start when my roommate logs in. Usually i can still continue playing with a ping of 50-60 but "usually" isnt "all the time". Sometimes, quite often, ping will jump and sit at a random number anywhere from 200ms to 1000 followed by a disconnect. You can imagine how frustrating this is considering the nature of moba games.

Now i am wondering — considering how little data the game is actually sending is there a way to just let it send this data before anything else? My roommate will be perfectly fine if his youtube video took extra few seconds to preload.

I have access to his iMac so i can probably install a software that will limit his speed directly but i would prefer to do it on router since we still have devices like ipad/iphone connected to the same network and they randomly download stuff as well.

Are there any options to "reserve" a small amount of bandwidth specifically for gaming?

p.s. i dont mind buying another router if i should but will i be able to plug it directly into sky router?

 

[bill001g]

I don't know what router you have but I doubt it.

First what you want to do is with a very advanced form of QoS on the router that most router do not have.

What you do is limit the traffic for one user (ie your roommate) to a fixed value so they can not use all the bandwidth. This should in theory leave the bandwidth for you to use. This works fine for data you send but the more likely issue is on the receive side. If the ISP decides to send data to him and drop your data your router can not recreate it. What you can do on the advanced routers is then throw away part of this data that was send him even though you already received it and it used up your bandwidth. The goal being that his application will detect this loss and request less data which in effect leaves more for you.

This work to a point but on a very tiny internet connection like yours even a couple extra packets here and there are going to cause issues. This trick of throwing away data really depends on the end machines taking action and that can take a few second and of course these end machine always try to increase their speed again hoping that they do not get errors. There needs to be a little extra capacity to allow for overhead.

So I am going to bet you can't fix it both because you router does not have the proper features and your connection is too small to tolerate the data burst you get in the implementation required to get this to work.

 

[Lieto]

2 Bill

I dont mind buying another router if thats what it takes.
The problem is chasing me for years and usually i just bought 2 broadbands — 1 for my girlfriend and one for myself for example. But it seems like its impossible to do here — all providers are using the same line.

The fact that no one came up with a solution to this, is "amazing" because every single person who isnt living alone and not having a fiber will have this same exact issues. I would imagine thats millions of people, hehe.

1. What i am really wondering is how do i shape upload traffic since its already so small. Do i just leave 0.25 for myself?
2. What router should i buy and will it work if i just plug sky router into it?
3. The settings i am really looking for is something like "this mac address should never have less than 0.5M/0.25M bandwidth allocated to it".
Limiting speed for every single device that can connect to our network seems counterproductive — because thats around 6 iphones and ipads. I dont want to have 0.1M on each of those device i just want to have a specific channel allocated for 1 device which is my macbook and every other device should share whats left. Does this make any sense?

 

[bill001g]

Most the asus and tplink ones have it. DD-WRT also has it.

What you need is a router that lets you match a ip/mac address and then set it to a fixed rate of xxkbits/sec. The ones that do high,medium and low are a complete waste. The hard part is getting one that will limit download rates....there are a number that can do upload rates.

There is a very good solution and it is implemented on commercial connection all the time. If you were to work with the ISP and set the QoS up right they could determine which traffic was more important when the connection to your house is full. The ISP charge a lot of money for this service if they offer it at all. It is generally cheaper to buy more bandwidth on smaller connection and this is is normally only done on very large connection where technical limitation prevent more bandwidth. Problem is on home connections people only care about the price, your average person would change providers if the ISP even charged $1/month for this service.

Your problem is indeed that you have such a small bandwidth. The rates are averages per second. It is burst of data that cause the problem.

As a example say we have a 10m ethernet. Data is ALWAYS transmitted at the full line speed. So say I want to limit someone to 1m. Lets also assume the program samples data and averages over a 10sec period of time.

So I can send data for 1 full second and then send nothing for 9 seconds. I can send data for 1/10 of a second and then nothing for 9/10 of a second for all 10 sec. Or I can send data for 1/2 a second during seconds #1 and #5. In all cases I get a rate of 1m/sec when averaged but the traffic is very very different in it impact on the network.

This average is controlled by what is called burst rate. If you set it too high you get big spikes of data and if you set it to low you can completely block traffic.

On a connection as small as yours it is almost impossible to set this burst rate correctly there is no room at all for error.

Besides it is mostly likely the download side that is causing your problem and that is even more complex to fix because you are trying to resolve the issue after the traffic has already arrived at your house and used up the bandwidth.

 

[Lieto]

I would probably invest into a good router if there would be one that would solve a problem.

As i said i had this problem earlier in the previous apartment where i had fiber with my download 28M and 7M upload. And i would imagine the problem would repeat itself as long as not all internet connection are super fast. Whenever my GF would download a movie my ping would drop dramatically, moreover if she would UPLOAD a movie it would be even worse. Its a shame really that there is no solution to just let my game have a freaking 1MB download to play with...

/desperate

 

[bill001g]

On a 28m connection you have more room to play and you can get better results but it is far from perfect.

The main problem is some people think netflix is important and other think some game is important and other even think their bit torrent is important.

This is the net neutrality issue you see being talked about with stuff like netflix lately. This is at interconnection between the ISP level. When they have issue implementing a QoS policy because nobody will agree there is no chance to get this fixed at the end consumer level where you have people inside the house likely bickering over whose traffic is more important.

The ISP I suspect have just decided that they do not want to even think to get involved in family disagreements and provide a service that could solve this.