How To Use Qos To Limit Bandwidth

Non all Internet traffic is equal. Streaming HD video or having a stutter-costless Skype call is probably more important to you than downloading a big file. The Quality of Service feature on your router lets you prioritize the things y'all care about, and so they happen faster than the things you lot don't.

What Exactly Is Quality of Service?

Quality of Service is an excellent and underutilized tool that allows you to train your router to divvy up your bachelor bandwidth between applications. With expert QoS rules, you can ensure that your streaming video doesn't stutter because a big file is downloading at the same time, or that your work laptop isn't sluggish when you're trying to meet that final infinitesimal borderline while your kids are playing games online.

It may aid to remember about Quality of Service like this: Allow'southward pretend, for a moment, that your Internet connexion is a hospital where the available bandwidth is the number of doctors available to treat patients. The patients are the dissimilar applications, and the triage nurse is the router.

On a normal network, the triage nurse is indifferent to the condition of the incoming patients and just assigns them to any available doctors, progressively spreading the staff of the hospital thinner and thinner with no regard for the severity of the patient's situation. Accidentally shot your manus with a nail gun during a DIY project? You become a doctor immediately. Someone simply got run over by a truck? They get a doctor immediately too. Somebody else shows upward with a cleaved arm? They get a doc likewise (but if it'southward getting actually busy pretty soon people are sharing doctors and nobody is getting particularly speedy care). Y'all can see how, in short order, the hospital would be a bogged down mess and high-priority patients wouldn't be getting high-priority care.

The same thing happens on your network at dwelling house–bandwidth is given out as needed, without much regard for what each application is doing. This means if you're on a Skype briefing call with your boss and your kids start watching Netflix, the quality of your Skype phone call can drop. The router is doing its best to share the available bandwidth between the two services, not really considering which is "more important".

QoS visualized with a service-based priority model.

Quality of Service, to render to our hospital illustration, is like a very competent triage nurse who directs patients to the right physician in the well-nigh efficient way: the guy who simply got run over by the truck volition get multiple doctors and the guy sitting at that place with the nail stuck in his paw from the bird-business firm-project-gone-wrong will wait a moment and get a single medico when he's seen.

Networks with a Quality of Service model applied volition prioritize, as y'all tell it, certain applications, services, and/or users over others so the of import things (Netflix, Skype calls, your Xbox Live connect, etc.) accept the virtually bandwidth and the best ping time.

How to Enable Quality of Service on Your Router

There are hundreds of unlike routers out there with wildly different firmware and capabilities. Some routers accept Quality of Service settings that are as simplistic as allowing you to prioritize the traffic from 1 computer over some other. Some have you specify what kind of services you desire to prioritize (e.g. streaming video over web browsing), and others offer granular control over nearly every aspect of the process.

RELATED: Plow Your Dwelling house Router Into a Super-Powered Router with DD-WRT

While we can't walk y'all through your exact router setup, we can highlight the fundamental considerations that become into configuring Quality of Service rules. For demonstration purposes, we will exist enabling Quality of Service rules on a router flashed to run the versatile DD-WRT third-party firmware. You'll need to log into your ain router's administration folio to see which–if whatever–of these features are available to you lot. Earlier proceeding, nosotros highly recommend checking the online documentation for your router on the manufacturer's website to determine what kind of QoS settings your router supports every bit well equally how to access them.

Footstep Ane: Establish Your Goal

Earlier you even open your admin page, think well-nigh your goals. What are you attempting to accomplish with quality of service rules? Do you desire to ensure that your home office computer always has priority over all the other devices in the house (e.g. all your work traffic should always exist more of import than amusement and gaming on the other devices)? Do you lot want to prioritize traffic from a block of IP addresses you've assigned to your home media server and Minecraft server to ensure speedy admission from exterior your domicile network? Do you lot want to prioritize Netflix then your streaming video is always shine?

For residential utilise, QoS rules should be selective and as minimal equally possible. Don't go crazy and set a dozen different rules correct out of the gate. Creating lots of different quality of service rules can cause more headaches than they solve, we'd encourage you to offset with the biggest consequence(s) and create a rule for dealing with it. If that resolves your network issues, so stop there. If not, you can continue with another rule.

Step Two: Determine Your Connectedness Speed

Once y'all've established your goals for your QoS setup, it's time to dive into getting information technology up and running. Save for the nearly unproblematic of QoS systems, nearly every QoS setup will ask about your upload and download speed to fix the limits on how much bandwidth users and services can gobble up. Absolutely do not rely on the advertised speed your ISP says your account has. Test it yourself to get a true measurement.

Offset, stop all high-bandwidth activities on your network: cease large downloads, stop streaming Netflix, and and then on. You lot want an accurate picture show of your real available upload and download bandwidth.

Next, visit speedtest.cyberspace and click the "Begin Test" button. Ideally, y'all should run this examination while your calculator is hooked upwardly with an Ethernet cablevision, or at the very to the lowest degree a fast Wi-Fi connexion (using modern wireless technologies like Wireless North or Wireless Ac). Old Wi-Fi network gear can bottleneck your network exam, and you lot won't get accurate results (e.g. your Wi-Fi gear can merely handle xl Mbps transfer but your connection is actually capable of 75mpbs).

Once you accept your results, convert the numbers from Mbps to Kbps (as the QoS control setup usually asks for these values in kilobits and not megabits). Y'all can do so by multiplying each value by chiliad. Thus, in our higher up case, we achieved 42,900 Kbps for our download bandwidth, and 3,980 Kbps for our upload bandwidth.

Pace Three: Enable QoS on Your Router

Again, for accent, we are using DD-WRT for demonstration purposes (because it has a robust QoS system); you'll demand to apply the full general principles as applicable.

First, open your router'southward admin folio. Open your web browser and type the IP address of your router into the address bar (Usually something like 192.168.i.1 or 10.0.0.1, though yous may need to check your router'south transmission). Log in with your username and password when prompted (once again, if you don't know what yours is, it may yet be the default one listed in your manual).

Once logged in, select the NAT/QoS tab, then the QoS tab. Starting time, select "Enable" next to "Commencement QoS". Leave the port gear up to WAN. Leave the Packet Scheduler and Queuing Subject set to the default country (it should be set automatically based on the router hardware).

Finally, fill in the downlink and uplink values. The values you fill in should be 80-95% the value y'all got with your speed examination. Multiply both values by 0.8 or 0.95 to go the reduced Kbps amount.

Why use a reduced value? Quality of service rules only work if the router and the quality of service algorithm tin create an artificial bottleneck to redirect traffic as the QoS handler sees fit. If yous use values equal to or larger than the maximum capacity of your connection then you lot give the QoS handler no wiggle room and the system becomes significantly less effective.

How to Prioritize Your Traffic

One time yous've turned the Quality of Service on, it's time to create basic traffic prioritization rules.

Some newer routers have dead-simple QoS options, where you just select the services you want to prioritize them (or drag-and-drop them on a list). Here, for case, is a screenshot from a newer ASUS router we accept:

Some routers are as easy as drag-and-drop, while others require more complex tweaks. — Some routers are as easy equally drag-and-drop, while others require more complex tweaks.

If that'south all yous want, and your router has that feature, try information technology and see what works. But if you desire more fine-grained control–or y'all accept an older router that doesn't have such simple setup–here are some more detailed instructions for setting up QoS.

Let's look at the dissimilar ways you can practise so, and which ones you should apply. DD-WRT uses a "priority" system, letting y'all tell it which services or devices are near important. The priority values are:

Maximum: lx% – 100%
Premium: 25% – 100%
Express: 10% – 100%
Standard: 5% – 100%
Bulk: i% – 100%

These values decide the amount of bandwidth allocated to a given application or device. For example, if you fix a service to "Maximum", you are saying "I desire this service to accept atleast 60% of the bandwidth, fifty-fifty when the network is busy, and 100% when information technology is not.". If you lot set a service to "Bulk" you're proverb "I don't intendance if this service uses a lot of bandwidth when the network is idle, merely when things are busy it only gets 1% of the available bandwidth".

As we emphasized above, be judicious in your application of quality of service rules.

Prioritize past Service

If you want every device on your network to have priority access to a certain app or service, and so you can creative a network broad service priority rule. Let's say, for the sake of instance, you want to ensure that Netflix gets priority over less bandwidth sensitive things similar general web browsing. You would first select the service from the drop-down carte, as shown below, so click "Add".

Once the service is listed, select the priority you lot wish to employ for it.

Prioritize by Interface

In networking lingo, an "interface" is the method by which your device is connected to the network. You can prioritize your local Ethernet network, you tin prioritize wireless connections, or you can even prepare rules that makes guest network traffic a low priority.

Let'southward await at how we tin make guest network traffic a low priority. From the driblet down carte we'll select "wl0.one" which, in network shorthand, is Wireless LAN #0 Virtual Network 1. Click "Add".

Once you've added the interface, you lot tin can specify the max upload/download speed and even prioritize services on the specific connection, equally seen in the screenshot below.

Interface priority is, because of the requisite knowledge of the cabalistic network naming schemes, ane of the more difficult priority systems to use. If you're unclear which network interface is which, nosotros'd recommend simply leaving this section lonely. You can read up on network interfaces in the DD-WRT wiki here.

Prioritize past Device with IP Addresses

RELATED: How to Set up Static IP Addresses On Your Router

Say yous want to give a specific device–similar your work computer–priority at all times. If y'all use static IP addresses or DHCP reservations on your network, you can prioritize traffic on certain computers and devices using their IP address. Many routers allow for this, and DD-WRT goes a step farther, allowing you to prioritize a group of IP addresses with a "netmask".

Allow's say, for example, that you want your home server, located at the static IP accost of 10.0.0.200, to have the highest priority admission to your network. You would input the address in the Netmask Priority department and append the end with 32, as seen below.

The 32 element is the netmask. Detailed discussion of netmask usage is a scrap beyond the telescopic of this tutorial, but suffice to say that a /32 mask is netmask shorthand for "only resolve this unmarried IP address". Any other smaller number will permit for the mask to embrace a college number of addresses in a given block (e.g. 10.0.0.200/24 would crusade the quality of service rule to apply to all 254 potential addresses in the 10.0.0.* block). You lot tin refer to this netmask quick reference guide to select a number that works for the section and size of the address cake y'all wish to prioritize.

If y'all discover the netmask organization to be a fleck confusing (information technology'south not exactly intuitive), it's best to just stick to /32 and manually input each IP address.

Once y'all click "Add together", you can assign priority admission to the address, like in the previous section.

Prioritize by Device with MAC Addresses

RELATED: How to Detect Any Device'southward IP Address, MAC Accost, and Other Network Connexion Details

If you don't use static IP addresses on your network, y'all can nevertheless prioritize sure computers and devices with their MAC accost. Refer to this guide for information on finding the MAC address of your devices–it'll either be on a physical label attached to the device, or somewhere in its software settings.

With the MAC address in hand, but enter it into the MAC priority section, click Add together, and and then assign a priority to the device every bit nosotros've washed in the previous sections.

At present regardless of what IP address your router assigns, say, y'all tin ensure your work laptop it volition e'er get priority.

Finally: Exam and Evaluate

RELATED: Clone Your Current Router for a Headache-Free Router Upgrade

The all-time thing you tin can exercise to minimize frustration with your QoS setup experience is, as we emphasized to a higher place, to have it slow. Set a rule for a big ticket item and then but use your network as your ordinarily would.

Does everything run smoother? Great! You're washed! Things still demand a fiddling fine tuning? Return to the QoS control panel. Double bank check your settings, suit the way you've allocated bandwidth, and, if necessary, create a new QoS rule.

When yous notice the Goldilocks configuration that keeps your network bustling along smooth and trouble free, by all means make notation of the settings yous used and have some screenshots (even better yet, back up your router configuration if your router supports it). Keeping rails of your router settings isn't just practiced for migrating to a new router it'due south great for setting things upwards quickly if you need to hard reset your router in the future.

Setting up Quality of Service rules isn't exactly as simple every bit just plugging your router in and slapping a new Wi-Fi password on it, but the payoff for configuring QoS rules is a much smoother internet experience. Some even