Is a switch with QOS my solution?

Garyj881 · 6 Dec 2018 at 18:58

I recently moved from Vodafone to EE and with the Vodafone router I could control download and upload speed for individual users with a very basic slider bar.

I used this to limit my son's download speeds as he was saturating the network. It was basic but worked great. The new router from EE doesn't have QOS so searched online to find a solution.

Will a gigabit switch offer this and be just as easy to use?

Can someone suggest one please?

bremen1874 · 6 Dec 2018 at 19:25

You'll be saturating your WAN bandwidth, not your LAN bandwidth.

Switch based QOS is only going to help for LAN based bandwidth.

Have you tried using the Vodafone router with EE? It's probably locked down so you can't, but it's worth checking.

What's he doing to cause the issue with the broadband connection that's presumably in your name?

Garyj881 · 6 Dec 2018 at 20:00

Playing on his PS4 whilst on Skype also watching YouTube on his pc and most likely on his phone too. If whilst doing this I want to stream something on Netflix and the other half is upstairs streaming too then we are at saturation point.

So ideally I need a new router then with QOS ability?

bremen1874 · 6 Dec 2018 at 21:03

Ideally you need faster broadband.

What connection type and speed do you have at the moment?

Garyj881 · 6 Dec 2018 at 21:13

It's not happening. The whole estate is run on alliminium. I sync at 24/8.

bremen1874 · 6 Dec 2018 at 21:45

So it's a VDSL (FTTC fibre) connection? If you're wanting recommendations for a suitable router we'll need to know the type of connection you have.

Rroff · 6 Dec 2018 at 21:51

Some managed switches (the cheaper ones are unmanaged) have varying degrees of traffic management but in this case you'll be realistically limited to throttling the LAN throughput for a specific port on the switch - IIRC mine can do it in 500kbit/s steps - but that will slow things down significantly if you want to do LAN to LAN transfers like copying files between machines (not for all machines just the ones on the ports you limit). Some more expensive (like enterprise level gear) can IIRC do more complex routing based management so that both destination as well as source are taken into account for throttling.

If you want actual QoS you'd really need a router with it or a very high end switch.

Garyj881 · 6 Dec 2018 at 21:52

Yes, I'm on FTTC.

A router with simple QOS functionality please.

pcfarrar · 7 Dec 2018 at 10:08

Garyj881 said:
A router with simple QOS functionality please.

Netgear D7800, ASUS DSL-AC88U, TP-Link Archer AC2800

Garyj881 · 13 Jan 2019 at 11:02

pcfarrar said:
Netgear D7800, ASUS DSL-AC88U, TP-Link Archer AC2800

I purchase the TP-Link AC2800 as recommended. Received a few days ago and was initially fine until I enabled and setup the QOS function. You have three slots in QOS, high priority, medium and low. I allocated 60% to high and put the smart TVs in it. I set the medium priority to 35% and put everything other device in it. I left low at 5% but didn't use it anyway. Alexa won't connect l, my Nest thermostat is very flakey and all phones have about a minute delay when connecting to a service or app.

Example, if I Load a game say Clash of Clans, I'm sat at a blank screen for 60 seconds before it loads.

If I put my phone I the high priority class, no change.

It only returns to normal if I disable QOS.

Explained all this to TP Link who came back to me a few days later to say, Sorry we don't have a fix.

So returning this tomorrow under DSA and I'm going to try another router

pcfarrar · 13 Jan 2019 at 12:26

Your quite limited on router choice unless you get a separate VDSL modem. I don't think QoS is great on the Asus DSL-AC88U or Netgear D7800 either.

A UniFi USG + UniFi AP would work well. You could just turn on Smart Queue QoS on the USG and it would stop your son from saturating the network. You'd need a VDSL modem though.

Rroff · 13 Jan 2019 at 12:36

I've never found QoS on any device - other than very high end enterprise gear - much good to be honest and often what the rules actually do is quite counter-intuitive to what you think they do with the shoddy implementation in most consumer routers. The best I've found is to leave most of it off, setup so that upstream bandwidth is managed so that no one application can use all the available bandwidth (limited to like 90%) and leave it at that which tends to offset most issues unless someone is hardcore running torrents with 1000s of connections cycling.