Prioritising game and voice traffic

Porkie · 11 Feb 2015 at 10:58

I am looking to get something that will let me prioritise game and voice traffic over my home network rather than general downloading. At the moment I have a 14mbps internet connection with no other options available, though hopefully by the end of the year that should improve.

Does this need to be done at router level, or can it be done with a managed switch. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Scottland · 11 Feb 2015 at 11:10

What router do you have? This would normally be under QoS settings, but some ISP supplied routers don't have this option.

Porkie · 11 Feb 2015 at 11:13

I currently have an ISP supplied router that does not have any QoS settings.

Sin_Chase · 12 Feb 2015 at 05:01

Managed switches can do QoS but ideally you want the shaping on your WAN rather than local connections which will be based off the wirespeed.

QoS works, sort of, on a WAN connection. Just remember it will only apply on one half of the connection. A consumer grade internet connection will not have end to end QoS tagging so your level of control will be limited.

What exactly is causing issues on your network? P2P, single threaded website downloads, streaming?

What voice traffic do you need to shape? Skype is notoriously difficult to shape because of it's P2P nature. You'll likely need an Application Layer capable device to manage Skype traffic.

thebennyboy · 12 Feb 2015 at 18:00

Sin_Chase said:
Managed switches can do QoS but ideally you want the shaping on your WAN rather than local connections which will be based off the wirespeed.

QoS works, sort of, on a WAN connection. Just remember it will only apply on one half of the connection. A consumer grade internet connection will not have end to end QoS tagging so your level of control will be limited.

What exactly is causing issues on your network? P2P, single threaded website downloads, streaming?

What voice traffic do you need to shape? Skype is notoriously difficult to shape because of it's P2P nature. You'll likely need an Application Layer capable device to manage Skype traffic.

DD-WRT lets me manage skype traffic using profiles, seems to work very well for me. L7 filter i think it's called.

This is how mine is currently set:

Sin_Chase · 13 Feb 2015 at 09:10

L7 is Layer 7. Which is the application layer on the OSI model I was referring to. You cannot filter Skype on a per port basis because it just uses whatever the damn well it wants >:/