QoS?

Hi guys, my first post on here, please be gentle (love the CZ deathmatch server by the way

Just got a question about routers, and specifically QoS availibity on routers. I'm due to be renting a room shortly from someone who uses P2P filesharing and bittorrent a fair bit. I'm a gamer and I would like to be able to continue gaming with a reasonable latency while he's downloading. The thing is, I'm not sure what router would provide the lowest latency for gaming. I've read about the D-Link DGL-4300 but a) its very expensive, b) I can't find anywhere to buy it (!), and c) the reviews didn't seem to rate it particularly well.

Basically, I'm looking for opinion of the best router to ge that'll do the trick. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Draytek routers have QOS but I think they would come under a) its very expensive

Yep - I ran QoS on my 2600VG - I can't say it did as much as I was hoping for, really..

Something like ADSL Optimizer is a better bet, but it requires another machine to be the QoS router..

i have dlink dsl-g624t router that has Qos settings page on it but so far i have been unable to find anything online on how to best set it up

it cost me about

Draytek 2700 and 2800 can do bandwidth management up and down for each IP.

Edited by Rich_A06 (Sun 29-Oct-06 11:43:13)

The 3Com 3CRWDR100A-72 Wireless ADSL2/2+ modem/router will do QoS and it's not expensive.

QoS Class: ATM QoS classes including CBR, UBR and VBR.

QoS Parameters: PCR (Peak Cell Rate), SCR (Sustainable Cell Rate) and MBS (Maximum Burst Size) are configurable.

It has support for gamers, have a look at this review by Andrew for an earlier 3Com model router.

Advanced Firewall Features
The 3Com router shares the same firewall functionality as the Belkin F5D7630-4A, which means you can lock down which applications can access the Internet from a range of computers. The controls provided are ideally suited to controlling things like access to streaming video or peer-to-peer apps in a shared house, thus reducing the load on the ADSL connection, so that for example gamers do not get latency spikes when playing. The method used is called IP Filtering.

One thing to be aware of with QoS routers is that most of them operate on the "used upstream vs. total upstream" and "used downstream vs. total downstream" principle.

With an ADSL connection, it is typical that maxed out upstream will significantly bottleneck downstream performance and the same in reverse. QoS functions typically do not address that issue, so be aware that QoS is not a panacea for all your bandwidth management problems.

What it will do is prioritise downstream or upstream, so for example a big ftp download will be backed off in favour of web-browsing or email collecting. It also assists in VoIP which involves both uploading and downloading, hence both will be backed off accordingly by the QoS.

In truth, ADSL is a difficult connection to bandwidth-manage with QoS, since whenever it starts to max out in either direction it all turns to sludge. The same is true (and worse) with cable connections. In my view, the following functions would benefit QoS:

1. If maxing out in either direction, back off up- and/or downstream traffic from max when priority traffic is required in either direction.

2. A ping function that measures spikes to determine that bandwidh usage needs backing off to service priority traffic.

I wrote to Draytek about this (I run a Vigor 2800G) and their response was that "these problems are down to the nature of DSL connections and therefore beyond our control. I happen to disagree; the QoS function simply needs to be more DSL aware which (in my view) is not too much to expect from a DSL router?!?

Seb

ps. I should add that the Vigor 2800 is an excellent router and this little gripe is just about making a good product even better. Fix that and the "forgetting DHCP leases when rebooting" issue and you have a just-about perfect router