Need help setting up QoS on Actiontec router

Telanor

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Sep 21, 2014
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I need help setting up QoS on my verizon router. It's an Actiontec MI424WR-GEN3I. The connection is shared across multiple computers and when one of them is downloading, it hogs all the available bandwidth and makes playing online games impossible. I've tried setting it up based on this guide: http://support.actiontec.com/doc_files/MI424WR_Rev._E&F_How_To_Configure_QoS.pdf but it had no effect, possibly because some parts of it were unclear.

In the traffic priority section, it says to add an input rule under either ethernet or coax. On my router page, the choices are worded as "Ethernet/Coax Rules" and "Broadband Connection (Ethernet/Coax) Rules". There's also "Network (Home/Office) Rules". Which one am I supposed to choose?

On step 7 of the traffic priority section, it says to add a rule under Network (Home/Office), but doesn't specify if that's an input or output rule. I assumed it's an output rule, is that right?

Is there anything else I need to do to get this working?
 
This router uses a different form of QoS than I have seen on others. What you might try to do is reserve bandwidth for the machine you want to play games on. You need to put in a RX rule since it is download that you are overloading.

Problem is you can really only control the upload. Traffic being downloaded is fully controlled by the ISP. When the ISP detect the connection to your house is full it must select traffic to throw away. The ISP could care less and randomly discards things that do not fit. When your router get the data it is too late you can not recreate the data. All your router can do is discard even more data from the streams you do not want to favor and hope the application detects it and slows down thereby leaving more room for your favored data. This really depends on the application, some work well like say youtube other like utorrent could care less and actually just open more sessions making the problem worse.

All you can do is try the reserve function and see if it works at all. In general QoS is not very effective in a home internet because in addition to the problem of the ISP randomly discarding you really can't always be sure you get the maximum rate. Many times the connection to your house is shared by your neighbors so there may be times when you have data being discarded even when you are not running at the maximum download rate. Obviously it would be nice if you could configure something to drop all your neighbors traffic and let yours though.
 

Telanor

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Sep 21, 2014
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I did try the reserve bandwidth setting while the other computer was downloading, but it didn't seem to have any effect. In fact I tried several things last night to see if I could limit my own connection in any way. None of them seemed to work.

Am I correct in thinking the traffic shaping rules do nothing without a traffic priority rule to apply them? Also, in the guide, for both priority rules, it says to set the destination address. I guess since I only care about downloading, it doesn't really matter, but wouldn't you set the source address for an output rule, rather than destination? It doesn't make much sense for an outbound packet to have a destination on the local network.

When setting a priority rule, regardless of whether it's inbound or outbound, there are options to set an Rx class name and a Tx class name. It seems like one of those two options is always going to be useless. Outbound rules should set a Tx class name and Inbound should set Rx, right?

I guess all that doesn't really matter though. I keep finding conflicting things on the internet about whether or not QoS does any good whatsoever for prioritizing gaming over downloads. Some sites make vague claims of 'boosting gaming quality' with some 2 click magic router, others don't even mention downloads and only talk about upload. But what you're saying about not being able to control the download sort of makes sense, so I guess I just have to put up with it.
 
All I can recommend is to keep messing with it. QoS is extremely non standard in the configuration. As you point out source and destination addresses are revered based on which direction they are applied.....you are way ahead of many people that do not understand that.

I would put in extreme values...to the point of almost completely blocking traffic to see if it has any effect.

Unfortunately I have never put QoS on that router so I can be of limited help. Even on the asus ones I have done the most they change it a lot every software release.

The key thing to even get to partially work is to try to get all other traffic except yours to be artificially limited to a value well under the bandwidth you pay for in the hopes when you need it there is enough left over.