Zen internet issues - QOS my solution?

Garyj881

Garyj881

Garyj881

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I have been with Zen for around 1 year and for the last 3 month had issues with buffering whilst streaming movies and disconnections.

I am on the Zen FTTC using a ZyXEL VGM1312 router.

My download speed is only 20Mbps and up is 7Mbps. (aluminum cables grrrr)

I have spoken to technical and they are advising me I am maxing my available bandwidth causing our buffering and disconnections.

Example
Room 1 Myself steaming Netflix and gaming on my mobile.
Room 2 My Partner watching Netflix and searching the web.
Room 3 My son On PS4, also on his PC watching youtube and possibly on phone.

The tech guy at Zen recommended setting up QOS as a possible solution, I have never had to do this before. Can someone explain why I have never had this issue before and advise on how this QOS is setup?

I had a quick look and didn't fully understand it.
 
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QOS is a way to either prioritise certain network traffic or set how much bandwidth certain traffic can use.

For example if you gave Netflix priority that would mean if the link becomes maxed out Netflix traffic would get priority and other traffic get dropped. This does assume you have enough bandwidth to handle all Netflix traffic.

The problem comes in traffic like gaming which is much harder to put under QOS and would likely suffer in some cases under normal use. We used to have 3.5Mb broadband, come gaming night I turned off wifi at the agreed time and had the only wired connection.

Just block Netflix and YouTube and you are sorted apart from the impending divorce that will bring :)
 
By disconnections do you mean the whole connection goes down or individual apps timeout? high bandwidth utilisation shouldn't cause the line to drop completely.

I'd check no one has torrents or some other peer to peer client running as well for instance some game launcher/updaters use such functionality and can impact slower connections severely.

Are the devices streaming netflix, etc. using wifi? its possible someone has recently started a new network in the area that is on the same channel(s) and causing congestion - if there are several wifi networks overlapping it can impact performance and reliability.
 
Gaming requires little bandwidth when actually playing. It will appear crap if your bandwidth is saturated though as your latency will suffer as a result. Given the example you quote I’d suggest addressing the video streaming which is likely to be the thing saturating your bandwidth. Two Netflix HD and a YouTube HD stream you quote simultaneously is going to max you out. Problem with QoS is that it’s all the same type of traffic, assuming you are streaming HD.

As a no cost experiment, and also without getting threatened with divorce, can you ask the family to limit their video watching to SD for a week and see if that helps? Three SD streams will be less than half your bandwidth and It will at least help identify if simultaneous video streams is the hog.
 
OK getting a bit further with this.

Had more disconnections, I started downloading a game through steam after work with no one else using the Internet and 10 mins in I lost Internet. This is with both lan and wan connections. When this happens the router does not indicate an issue.

I have spoken to Zen again the Tech guy asked me to ping BBC next time it happens. So I reset the router and resume my Skyrim download, 10 mins later disconnection again.

So I pinged the BBC, no success, I then pinged the BBC ip address and it reached. Is this now a DNS issue?
 
Garyj881 said:
So I pinged the BBC, no success, I then pinged the BBC ip address and it reached. Is this now a DNS issue?
Click to expand...

Possibly? What DNS Settings is your router using?

Either try Google's:
8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

or openDNS
208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
 
The problem with downstream QoS on a router is it only applies once the data hits your router. It doesn’t do anything for the traffic upstream of your router so is a bit of a meh thing to buy into.

I’ve recently done a lot of research on QoS trying to negate upstream saturation and in short it was prioritise acks, dns, http, https, mail and then anything else in that order
 
There'll be an element of QoS on the ISP side involved in sending the data to you though, so any real-time traffic should already be prioritised as long as it's not contained inside a VPN or just a stream of HTTPS data.
 
None of this sounds like something that could be fixed with client side QoS.

'I can't game because too many people are streaming' is something that could potentially be fixed with QoS.

'I can't reliably stream' points to a more fundamental issue.

Disappointing that Zen don't appear to have taken proper ownership of the problem.
 
I use QOS quite successfully within PfSense, there is a limit to what it can achieve though. 3xVideo Streaming and 2xGaming on 20Mbps has got "Stutter" written all over it.
 
One solution to the OP's issue is to install cFosSpeed. You have to install the software on all your computers on the network and it will control your bandwidth with set rules, games high priority etc.

https://www.cfos.de/en-us/gigabyte/index.htm

If you go to Gigabyte website and find a board that it came with, you can install from there without having to buy a licence, I have used the software before and it appeared to work.


Steveocee said:
The problem with downstream QoS on a router is it only applies once the data hits your router. It doesn’t do anything for the traffic upstream of your router so is a bit of a meh thing to buy into.
Click to expand...

The Draytek 2860 can do QOS on downstream, it's done by controlling the ACK packets.
 
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JasonM said:
The Draytek 2860 can do QOS on downstream, it's done by controlling the ACK packets.
Click to expand...

That's not really QoS on the downstream though, that's manipulating the upstream acks so the downstream delivers in a more predictable way. I don't argue that it doesn't/won't work.
 
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