Bandwidth Hogging

Square Box AV

Square Box AV

Square Box AV

Associate
Joined
12 Sep 2011
Posts
4
Hi. I've got an issue with my home internet connection. I have ethernet connections running from 4 ports on the router to different rooms in the house and all being used for pc's/consoles etc.

Everything works fine without any issues under normal usage however, as soon as my son starts to download a game onto his console or pc, the port he is using automatically hogs all of the bandwidth and no one else in the house can use the internet.

This is the only port/room that does this and it happens whether he's downloading on his console or pc.

My router does not have any QoS service on it. Can anyone advise why this might be happening and suggest if there is a work around without the need to buy a router with QoS?

Thank you.
 
What router have you got?

You need to either use a router with a fair bandwidth sharing algorithm (like fq-codel or cake), or some way of manually restricting bandwidth to the console
 
Sorry everyone for late reply and thank you all for responding. I am on EE fibre, getting 80mbps to the router and regularly test it and haven't had any problems with drops in the mbps. I'm using their smarthub which doesn't have QoS.

So going by the responses then I'm looking at a new router with QoS? There is no way of throttling the console, not sure about the pc. It's just strange that it's only that port on the router that allows the hogging. I've looked at the settings for each port and can't see any difference in each if them.

Can anyone recommend a decent router with QoS? Nothing too extravagant as it's only for home use. Cheers.
 
On the PC in adapter properties you could change speed to 10mbps

Might be something similar on console by creating a manual profile

Or replace link to router with cheap power line adapters
 
Square Box AV said:
Sorry everyone for late reply and thank you all for responding. I am on EE fibre, getting 80mbps to the router and regularly test it and haven't had any problems with drops in the mbps. I'm using their smarthub which doesn't have QoS.

So going by the responses then I'm looking at a new router with QoS? There is no way of throttling the console, not sure about the pc. It's just strange that it's only that port on the router that allows the hogging. I've looked at the settings for each port and can't see any difference in each if them.

Can anyone recommend a decent router with QoS? Nothing too extravagant as it's only for home use. Cheers.
Click to expand...

You have an 80Mbit WAN connection, if your game download is capable of using all of that, everything else suffers without QoS (as you seemingly realise already from the op). It has nothing to do with 'that port on the router' - you could plug the console/PC into any port and you will still have the same issue. HG612 from eBay and a decent router with functional QoS that works is the solution here, oddball - and less functional - solutions exist using managed switches and AP's that allow rate limiting per SSID, but you want to stay wired and you are much better with QoS on the router.
 
Square Box AV said:
Can anyone recommend a decent router with QoS? Nothing too extravagant as it's only for home use. Cheers.
Click to expand...

A few users have had good success recently with the Honor Router 3 - £50-ish from Honor’s website or a little bit more from Amazon.

You can limit bandwidth by device.

The only challenge there is with your EE FTTC connection you’ll need something to act as a modem. The EE router has that built-in and the Honor doesn’t.

Openreach modems from ECI and Huawei are freely available on eBay for £10-£20 depending on whether you want a new one, and a box etc.

Or, you could just plug the Honor into the EE router and disable wireless on the EE router. That will work fine, but you will have an extra network address translation (NAT) step in there that isn’t optimal. For the money (£70-ish) I don’t know of a better value solution to your issue than the Honor 3 router and an Openreach modem.
 
One option is to add a managed switch with QoS into the equation - though many of them (at least the cheaper ones) simply set the bandwidth per port in 0.5Mbps steps rather than proper QoS so unless you wanted to always limit a port to less than the full connection speed it isn't necessarily a good idea.
 
Thank you everyone for the replies, you've all been really helpful. You've all given me a few options and I'll look into them all to try and see which will be best for us to get this resolved
 
If you pay for the broadband have a word with your son. Ask him to schedule his downloads overnight when no one else is using the internet.
If you are working from home or trying to stream video in the evenings his downloads can wait.
 
Mujja said:
If you pay for the broadband have a word with your son. Ask him to schedule his downloads overnight when no one else is using the internet.
If you are working from home or trying to stream video in the evenings his downloads can wait.
Click to expand...

Lol - 80Mbps should be enough to download, stream and work from home at the same time - as already mentioned, just a matter of a better router to divide that bandwidth better
 
The newer consoles will saturate his bandwidth. The games and patches are causing a disruption to other users, the 80Mbps isn't enough for his needs.
To save the OP wasting time and money, he just needs to have a polite word with his son.
 
Mujja said:
The newer consoles will saturate his bandwidth. The games and patches are causing a disruption to other users, the 80Mbps isn't enough for his needs.
Click to expand...
Despite the fact that limiting the console (or indeed all devices in the household) to say 20Mbps, would allow everything to coexist fine (albeit with downloads taking a bit longer)

Mujja said:
To save the OP wasting time and money, he just needs to have a polite word with his son.
Click to expand...
Your Kids must love you - "Sorry Kids, you can't play with your friends tonight, you'll have to wait until tomorrow as you can only download updates overnight"
 
To be honest he isn't too bad and if I asked him to do the downloads or updates over night he would do that. But I don't want to go down that route if it's at all avoidable. Kids at the minute have little enough interaction with their friends during lockdown and I don't want to restrict that further.

I've just noticed that the port he is connected to is the WAN port of the router, would this by why he getting priority over the other LAN ports? That may be a stupid question but thought I would throw it out to you guys who know a lot more than me.
 
Armageus said:
Your Kids must love you - "Sorry Kids, you can't play with your friends tonight, you'll have to wait until tomorrow as you can only download updates overnight"
Click to expand...

I have a decent BB service so we don't have that issue. Upgrading is the first thing I suggested to the OP.

We don't know the OP's technical knowledge or what products are compatible with his EE provided router. I'm suggested the simplest option for the OP, what's your issue? Limiting bandwidth would also mean they'll need to wait to play new or updated games, what's the difference?
 
Mujja said:
I have a decent BB service so we don't have that issue. Upgrading is the first thing I suggested to the OP.

We don't know the OP's technical knowledge or what products are compatible with his EE provided router. I'm suggested the simplest option for the OP, what's your issue? Limiting bandwidth would also mean they'll need to wait to play new or updated games, what's the difference?
Click to expand...

Why exactly don’t we know what products are compatible with his EE router? They’re just another OR re-seller that happen to be BT owned. I can see why you say what you say, and I’m glad it’s working for you, but that’s not how bandwidth generally works unless you have a disproportionately large pipe and/or the external servers you are pulling data from can’t saturate it. As op is on FTTC, he’s likely one of the overwhelming majority (its claimed to be 65%ish from memory, but that ignored overbuild, and between OR, VM and alt-net you have a lot of overbuild) who haven’t got options for a faster service yet. Even if he did, without QoS it’s likely he will run into the same problem sooner or later, that’s why prioritising latency sensitive traffic is a better idea than what you suggest. Extra bandwidth doesn’t solve everything, I can have the same problem with a remote 10Gb WAN set-up if I don’t manage it.
 
Mujja said:
I have a decent BB service so we don't have that issue.
Click to expand...
Good for you

Mujja said:
Upgrading is the first thing I suggested to the OP.
Click to expand...
Most people don't have that luxury - myself included with a ~24Mbps internet connection, which through the miracles of bandwidth management allows the Kids to play games, my wife to stream 1080P Netflix, whilst I am able to work uninterrupted.
Without such magic, I would have to tell my wife to watch her shows at midnight, and the Kids find friends who are awake overnight.

Mujja said:
I'm suggested the simplest option for the OP, what's your issue?
Click to expand...
That it's a ridiculous and impractical suggestion, that can easily be solved with technology.

Mujja said:
Limiting bandwidth would also mean they'll need to wait to play new or updated games, what's the difference?
Click to expand...

I'm sure there's a difference between waiting say 35 minutes to download a 5GB Game update at a capped 20Mb/s, than having to wait until the next day because my parents couldn't be bothered to implement sensible bandwidth prioritisation.
 
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