Quality of Service Routers (under 100€)

gismoT

Commendable
Jun 18, 2016
2
0
1,510
Hi all!

The problem:
5 Mbit Connection, 5 People and their devices. (3 gamers)
Already best ISP.

Idea:
Get a Router with QoS / that can prioritize ports and the requesting/receiving client.
I did some goggling with "dynamic bandwidth allocation", and found QoS -> Nighthawk router / tomato. But it seems to me, that they are not dynamic in the sense that they prioritize clients but not split the available bandwidth in equal parts for each client and give special applications eg skype a higher priority on a top level ( excluded from the splitting).

Am i completely off?

Question:
Is there a Router under 100 euros that has the ability to distinguish file downloads from voip/games and can additionally split the remaining traffic?

 
Solution
pretty much anything that can run tomato/dd-wrt/open-wrt. You could buy buffalo if you wanted one preloaded.

Asus is expensive but they have more options in their factory firmware and they also have their version of dd-wrt
You are going to have a massive issue with only 5m no matter what do. 1 hd stream from netflix can eat that so 5 user even doing normal web traffic will likely overload it.

What you have found is the best you can get. The major problem you have is ISP is in full control of traffic coming to your router. If they decide to drop certain traffic and send other what can your router do. It can not undelete something it never received and drop something else. The whole concept of priority only work before you send the data so it only really works on UPLOAD traffic. The ISP if you had a high end enterprise account could let you set QoS in their router but you will never see than in a home user account.

The fixed limitations on download traffic are the best you can hope for. They are used to enforce bandwidth limits. This does not actually though buy itself reduce the traffic. If you receive 5m of traffic and drop 3m of it from the end machine perspective you only get 2m rate but it still eats 5m of your bandwidth. This is all dependent on the end client to fix this. It depends on the end client to detect the data loss and slow it rate of requesting the data. It is the end client not really the router QoS configure limiting the traffic. This means it works better for some application than others. Thing like youtube or netflix quickly detect the loss and reduce the quality settings. Things like torrent completely ignore it and actually just try harder to get the lost data. Things like games run a fixed rate no matter what so if they get cut below their required rate you get lag spike and rubber banding.

The third party firmware option is going to be your best bet but I suspect with only 5m and 5 people you are not going to be able to do much.