What is the best router for gaming, streaming, and a family of 6?

This is a pretty common question that comes up on the forums. In all likelihood your bottleneck is NOT your router, but rather your download pipe FROM your ISP TO your router.

Let's say you have a 10Mbps connection with your ISP but computers on your network are waiting to receive 20Mbps worth of data... what happens? Your ISP queues any traffic that doesn't fit within the 10Mbps data cap. At some point when the queues get full it will start ditching data. That queuing and lost packets results in lag when gaming.

One common piece of advice (ISPs love to give you this one) is to get a router that supports QoS (quality of service). In theory this sounds great as it prioritises traffic. So you can, in theory, set it up to give your XBox first priority and deprioritise all other devices.

Now, that works great if your bottleneck in on your UPLOAD (i.e. From your router TO your ISP). In that case your router will start creating queues for traffic that can't be delivered within your upload speed, but as soon as it receives any data from your XBox that data jumps the queue and gets delivered straight away. If that's your issue then QoS is a great solution.

The problem is that almost everyone finds themselves saturating their DOWNloads, not their uploads. In that case it's the ISP that's holding the queues, not your home router. There's very very little that your home router can do to affect the queues on your ISPs end.

I've read some things that claim that QoS can sort-of control downloads by limiting the outgoing traffic. Youtube for example (any server works like this) will only continue sending a video stream when it receives regular updates from the client confirming that packets are received and the client requests more. It is possible that a router could block or delay this client traffic and thereby indirectly prevent a saturated downlink... but I yet to see any definitive write-ups of this or confirmation that it actually works. If someone has info on this, I'd love to see it because this is a very common problem.

The short answer is, you can try getting a router that supports QoS and set it up properly. It might help. I'm sceptical it'll solve the issue, but it's probably worth a try.

Only other solutions are to buy a faster download from your ISP (that way it's harder to saturate your downlink).
Or, if you need to get elaborate and all other clients are on wireless, you could try limiting your wireless to a speed slower than your ISP download. That would effectively shift the bottleneck to the wireless and leave capacity on your downlink for the cable-connected XBox.

Good explanation rhysiam.

The theory that limiting the upload can limit download speeds is based on how TCP window size works. This is actually a error recovery protocol not QoS. The theory is if you manage to drop enough of the ack packets the window size will never get large. How well it works is dependent on how aggressive the tcp stack in the server is configured to be. Still a ack packet is only 64 bytes. You have to set the upload rate extremely low to block enough of these small packets to have much effect. Of course it has no effect at all on the worst offender utorrent since it does not use TCP.

OP, I'll answer your private message here. Best to keep things in the thread as it may help others in the future.

What's your internet download speed? Can you up it?

If you have anyone in the house doing torrents, make sure they limit their speeds when everyone's online.

Maybe you could encourage those you share the connection with to drop their video streams to standard def? It makes a massive difference to bandwidth.

If you really only have the force-limit solution, you could look at disabling wifi G/N/AC on your router and going wireless B (11mbps) or wireless G (54mbps) only. If you set it to one that's less than your internet, you should have whatever's left exclusively for any cabled devices.

Oh... you sometimes get about half (or even less) than the advertised speed with wireless, so 11mbps is probably more like 5-6mbps real, 54 more like 20-35mbps.

Like was stated you can't really fix your problem with QoS if the problem is download congestion.

QoS especially is not some magic thing you can just click a few boxes and it works without you knowing what you are doing. It require that you have a lot of knowledge of how the data from your house actually works.

The best QoS you are going to get are going to be DD-WRT routers. DD-WRT can be loaded on many router but this too is not some trivial thing you can do without some study.

Lets just say when you can understand these statement you can actually do traffic limitation on a dd-wrt router. This is just a sample from a dd-wrt configuration.

tc qdisc del dev br0 root
tc qdisc add dev br0 root handle 1: cbq avpkt 1000 bandwidth 10mbit
tc class add dev br0 parent 1: classid 1:1 cbq rate 700kbit allot 1500 prio 5 bounded isolated
tc filter add dev br0 parent 1: protocol ip prio 16 u32 match ip dst 192.168.1.133 flowid 1:1
tc filter add dev br0 parent 1: protocol ip prio 16 u32 match ip src 192.168.1.133 flowid 1:1

Even after all this is can be a waste of time. No matter how hard you try there is nothing you can do if the line gets to 100% load and the ISP drops some of what you thinks is critical traffic, its not like your router can recreate the data and drop something else. Even worse if you are on a cable connection the ISP may be dropping your data to allow your neighbors traffic since the connection to your house is shared.

Unless you have a really old router it is highly likely the router is slowing you down, it is almost always your internet connection, and the only solution for that is to buy more bandwidth.

Your best bet if it is critical is to buy a separate internet connection that is a lot larger than you would ever need for that application. The ISP are always quoting maximum rates assuming nobody (ie all your torrent and netflix loving neighbors) are not using the bandwidth also.

Let keep it really simple then.

If you have too many people using your internet then you will get lag in your games.

Ask them not to use the internet when you need it is likely the best solution.

Any technical solution will require you to spend some time to learn some things, there is no magic box you can buy and flick a switch and it solve all your problems.

Lets look at 2 cases and you pretend you are the router.

1. You receive 2 packets one from the game console and one from someone else in your house. The connection going to the ISP is full and you must discard a packet. Pretty easy lots of solutions you can think of I suspect. This is the QoS most routers claim to have and is simple to implement.

2. Your download connection is running at 100% utilization and you detect that a bunch of data is missing for your game console and have determined the ISP is discarding it. You are still receiving a bunch of data for other machine in your house but they too are missing traffic. All devices appear to be losing about the same amount of traffic.

So in case 2 what you want to happen is for the ISP to discard even more of the other machines traffic and send you all the game consoles traffic. If you are the router and can do anything you want how would you accomplish this. If you can't think of a way then why would you think a router can accomplish this.

Obviously you can call up and ask the ISP to configure their routers to do this if you are willing to pay the costs but it is not a option for any residential or smaller business packages.

In simple terms, if your max bandwidth speed is 20mbps down/2mbps up for your internet connection; it'll be smart to limit your download/upload speed to 80-85% by using the bandwidth limiter on the router (not all routers have this option). This way you will not utilize 100% of your 20mbps/2mbps internet connection; which means that your internet connection will not get congested and data traffic will not be lost when many devices are on the network at the same time. The next step is to use Quality of Service to prioritize most of your bandwidth on gaming and partially for all other things. For example, 40% (high) for gaming, 35% (medium) for Netflix, and 25% (low) for everything else. QoS acts differently with every router and they all won't do the same thing.

I assume the Nighthawk can do this (someone correct me if I'm wrong). Also, routers that can be flashed with 3rd-party firmware like DD-WRT/Tomato, etc. can do this.

This was discussed farther up the thread and you are just confusing the issue by not reading the thread.

How does anything you just said solve the problem of the ISP dropping the traffic. How does setting the traffic to high,medium or low magically get the traffic back that was discarded. How does anything you set on you router in anyway control what the ISP chooses to send or drop.

All this fancy QoS is for OUTBOUND traffic and sure it works but it does not solve the problem of overloaded inbound (download) traffic.

Again you set the traffic you SEND to better priority it has absolutely no impact on the data you receive. If you are exceeding your upload rates...ie someone is seeding torrents or something silly it will help.

If you have say a huge youtube video eating download traffic how does the ISP know if that traffic is important or not. Its not like they go in and read the configuration on your router.

Did you not read the beginning of my paragraph on bandwidth limiting? If the internet connection is being congested and data traffic is being dropped due to download speeds at 100% utilization then limiting the download speeds will eliminate this problem. Same thing applies to upload speeds. I had the same problem with my internet connection and it's fixed now. Depending on the router, QoS can control how much bandwidth (INBOUND TRAFFIC) can be prioritized for gaming, Netflix, downloads, etc. If you don't prioritize bandwidth with QoS then you'll get lag with multiple devices/applications running at the same time since one thing could use more bandwidth than the other.

Most cheap routers do not have bandwidth limiting or advanced QoS, but the Nighthawk will most likely do this.

However, it really depends on how much bandwidth the OP is paying for. If it's too slow then the only solution is to pay for faster internet. If it's fast enough already then he needs to do what I mentioned. 6 people on 20/2 connection might not be fast enough depending on everyone's usage, but tweaking QoS would still help.

I have a Asus RT-N66U flashed with Tomato Shibby and I no longer have the same issues as the OP.

I did read it but you are ignoring the problem and thinking talking about other topics solves it.

So I will give you a very clear example and you tell me how your magic software fixes this.

Say I am a server on the internet and I have a application that sends a pc in your house 10mbit of data a second using UDP. I keep sending the data until it is done maybe it takes 10 hours.

So now you go into your router and bandwidth limit the traffic to say 5m. What good does that do. I still send 10mbit and you throw away 5m. You are still receiving 10m of data and your connection is still full. It likely just means you have increased the time to over 10 hours that the connection is overloaded.

........
You are getting off into a topic the OP did not want to even look at related to understanding the applications and dropping certain data but it does not work for all applications like the example I gave.

He's talking about prioritizing gaming over applications/devices and QoS fixes that. Bandwidth limiting can solve slower internet connections if they are being congested with 100% utilization; if bandwidth limiting doesn't work then he'll need to pay for faster internet. There's a thing called ISP internet bandwidth throttling and that usually happens when you utilize 100% of your internet connection for too long. With 6 people on a 20/2 connection... this could be a possibility for the OP's problem. You're making it sound like it's rocket science to play games, surf the internet, and watch Netflix at the same time.

Server connections to a PC is not a good example since it doesn't sound like it is the OP's problem. OP just wants to play games without lag and I highly doubt gaming online takes up much bandwidth. He just needs to prioritize and control the bandwidth within his network.

Lets go back he "plays games for money". This means even a small amount of delay not even loss can make the difference. These are the guys that buy monitors that can refresh at 144hz because they feel that the 5ms of extra delay you get on a 60hz monitor can make a difference. I can't tell but the pro gamers it does make a difference.

I figured you were just going to fall back on its "not a valid" case argument. I didn't want to get into the details because then you would just find some exception to that app. Audio/Video confercing systems, some remote security camera monitoring systems, the actual data stream in games, the patchers in some games and the worst offender of course is torrent. All these pretty much push data at a fixed rate.

So I guess you now agree that you can't limit the data on the receiving side for all traffic.

Maybe if you can explain exactly why you CAN limit netflix I will change my mind and see you might understand how this software actually works. Hint it is not in anyway related to netflix it is something extremely fundamental.

This type of software was partially discussed very early in the thread but did not go that way when the OP made it pretty clear he just wanted a box he could turn on and it works. To make stuff like this work you have to have extensive knowledge of the type of data you are sending and even then there are a lot of things that just refuse to work well.

I do networking for a living and we use QoS all the time to make our voice and video traffic work in a private network. Unless you have complete control of the network you are never going to be able to get a guaranteed service level for critical applications.

I also work in IT and yes, I understand that you can't control all data on the receiving side, but if you can limit the bandwidth on certain devices/applications with QoS then the OP doesn't need to pay for faster internet to play games since he can limit how much bandwidth voice/audio conferencing, security cameras, torrent, etc. uses. Yes, torrent is the hardest to stop since they can use any port for it and that's why you can do several things to slow it down. You can enable the ports that you need and blacklist the rest of the ports or do it by port range. You can limit the bandwidth for each device connected on Wi-Fi so they can't go above a certain bandwidth. You can even block the torrent sites on the router, etc.

Yes, you can limit how much bandwidth Netflix can use. It's easier to change your Netflix settings to standard definition, but you can even limit the bandwidth with QoS. So if you were to change the playback settings for Netflix on Auto and limit the bandwidth to 1000kbps then it won't use more than that. It may not be the best solution, but it works if you set it up right.

I do agree that you need some knowledge on how to set up the router; it is definitely not a plug-and-play device.

I'm sorry aylafan, but QoS does NOT fix the problem if the problem is a saturated download (which unless you have people torrenting... it usually is). Let me have one more go at explaining.

For traffic going UP (out) of your network, QoS on your router is a perfect solution. You tell your router you have 2Mbps upload. If the devices on the network attempt to send more traffic than that then your router creates a queue and delivers the traffic as soon as there is capacity. Your router knows (because you configured it properly) that XBox traffic is critical, so as soon as it receives packets from the XBox they jump the queue and are delivered straight away. QoS is a perfect solution for a saturated *UP*link.

Saturated *DOWN*link however, QoS on your home router has very little ability to resolve the problem. As I've stated above. Let's say you have 6 computers watching netflix and one gaming... that's too much data so your ISP (NOT your home router) starts creating queues for the traffic. If you're saturated for some time too, the queues get full and the ISP will simply dump traffic. The ISP doesn't (usually) discriminate between traffic types, it just queues (and dumps) it all on a first-come-first served basis and your home router has no ability to tell your ISP which traffic is more important, it's the ISP creating the queues and dumping the traffic, not any equipment that's under your control.

Think of it this way, if you have an airport with more people trying to arrive than there are seats on flights, queues will start to form at the airport people are flying *FROM*. The destination airport (which for the analogy is like your home router) can't solve that problem. There's no point creating queues or prioritisation rules for the destination airport, because once people get there they've already arrived, you may as well let them go. The problem is at the origin airport (your ISP for the sake of analogy).

In which case my analogy was probably condescending rather than explanatory. I still (respectfully) disagree with you on this, but certainly did not intend to patronise... my apologies.

Yes, you can limit how much bandwidth Netflix can use. It's easier to change your Netflix settings to standard definition, but you can even limit the bandwidth with QoS. So if you were to change the playback settings for Netflix on Auto and limit the bandwidth to 1000kbps then it won't use more than that. It may not be the best solution, but it works if you set it up right.

/quotemsg]

So how does the ROUTER change the netflix settings. What he should go yell at his kid every time the game gets slow and tell them to change the netflix setting.

You have gone from I can use a magic box to do all this to he just "somehow" needs to limit his use of certain apps and go in and change the app settings.

This is exactly why I gave a clear example that was not specific so you try to get it both ways. You say its not a valid example and then when I do give example you nitpick things rather than discuss the original problem.

So if I am sending 10m and you drop 5m it does not reduce the congestion....or do you still think it does.

I clearly said that you "CAN" limit netflix with the router without changing anything in netflix.

What I want to know is why that is different than say a video conferencing service. I almost spelled this out for you. It actually has nothing at all to do with the application. Understanding this is fundamental to understanding why limiting traffic is extremely hard on incoming side. Even you who work in IT could not come back and quickly tell me what the difference was between my example and netflix show how hard this topic is. Even just identifying that it was TCP would be a start.

Since I am tired of even discussing this go look and see what affect data loss has and TCP WINDOW size. This is not QoS this is a error recovery protocol that is part of the TCPIP stack.

I also apologize if my views were too strong, but the way I see it is the router controls how much bandwidth the other devices/application can use and how much bandwidth can go through the router. Yes, I do understand your views that if the data requested or coming from the ISP is more than the user's bandwidth than data will be queued and it'll slow down the network big time. However, the OP just wanted to have a smoother experience with gaming in general. So with the router, you can prioritize gaming to use more bandwidth than the other users on Netflix. The other users will have to battle for the rest of the available bandwidth. Gaming doesn't take much bandwidth at all and it doesn't hurt to give more priority to gaming from inside the network.

bill001g - I don't need you to lecture me on networking terms; I already work in IT and know what I'm doing. Only reason I responded to the OP was because I have the same internet provider (TWC) with the same internet connection 20/2 and around 5 people sharing my connection. They also watch Netflix, Hulu Plus, play games, and download on my router. I brought a new and more expensive router because I can control the bandwidth for certain applications/devices. My old cheap router did not have advance options for QoS and if any one person did something bandwidth intensive the network would slow down to a crawl or the router/cable modem would drop internet connection. The way I have it set up now doesn't affect my gaming or streaming.

We are right back were we started though.


The ISP get a packet for netflix and a packet for a game. It throws away or delays the game packet and send the netflix packet.

Now your router gets it and does what. The packet is gone. There is nothing left to give priority.

This is the fundamental problem. How can you give things priority that you have no control over.

Aylafan got it right, everyone else please shut up.