I've been using this old SOHO router as my primary connection to the Internet for quite a few years
and it still works great and I like it.
Problem is though is that I'm paying for a 10 megabit up and 50 megabit download total bandwidth and
that's what I'm paying for with my monthly ISP bill.
And generally that's more than enough for my small network, however, I'm starting to run into trouble.
For example I've tried to voice over IP phone but I'm finding that it's dropping out and I'm not getting
the connection that I'd like.
I also find that if I'm watching a movie suddenly I have trouble with other types of services.
So what I want to do is take advantage of the bandwidth. That 50 megabit down 10 megabit up that I'm
given.
Did I say given? That I pay for and I want to manage that bandwidth in such a way that I utilize it in the
best possible way.
Now what we're going to be dealing with are a number of things here.
First of all we're going to be dealing with what we call Traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is a generic term
that simply means I'm going to control traffic based on all kinds of stuff. I can control traffic based
on the type of service that's coming in or out of the system.
I can talk about things like based on an IP address or even a MAC address or what port it's going in
and out of I can do anything that I want to control traffic based on whatever criteria.
The important thing is that we're always controlling the traffic and it's called Traffic shaping. The
best way and most common way we see to do this is what we call quality of service. Quality of service
is simply a mechanism by which we can perform traffic shaping.
Now I need to warn you the network plus does not go into quality of service in much great detail so
I'm not either.
It can get a lot hairier and a lot deeper than this but what I am going to show you will work for SOHO
type scenarios so let's go ahead and jump into this router and let's take a look at Quality of Service.
OK so this particular SOHO router has a nice little web based configuration screen so you got to go
in here and I just know from experience where to look on this particular one it's under Applications
and gaming and it has
QoS. Now first of all as we take a look here ignore that wireless stuff at the top it'll say enabled
or disabled do I want to turn on QoS?
Yes I do.
Now the second one is upstream bandwidth.
A lot of these devices have trouble determining what your upstream bandwidth is automatically.
So you can either set that to auto or if you want to you can set it manually.
I'm going to leave it to auto cause it does a good enough job as it is.
All right.
So I've turned on quality of service. Now
what I need to do is begin saying who gets what kind of quality of service.
The trick here is that every router is going to be handling this differently.
Some times you'll see pick a service and they get a percentage of the bandwidth.
Other times they'll say pick a service and they get x number of megabits per second.
But what we see on this particular router is it uses a priority basis.
So let me show you how one of these works.
So what I'm going to use for starters is I'm going to use MSN messenger because well my dog uses
MSN messenger way too much so I'm going to lower that and you can see I just have four levels here.
High medium normal and low.
So I'll apply it.
And now I've set a low priority MSN Messenger.
Now keep in mind that that doesn't mean MSN messenger is going to run slower.
It just means that if it gets busy he's going to be one of the first guys to be cut and he'll be slowed
down. Not stopped just slowed down.
That was fun let's do it again.
Now on this particular router I can do some other stuff like it's actually kind of fun.
I could set up by MAC address. So we'll say my home theater
and if I knew my MAC address which I don't know off the top of my head I could go ahead and type that
in and I could give that a really high priority.
So we'll hit apply there.
He didn't like that MAC address but you get the idea anyway.
So let's go to another one. Here is like online games for example and we can go in pick a particular
game World of Warcraft, whoops, I want World of Warcraft.
You pick World of Warcraft,
and because I love World of Warcraft more than anything I'm going to set it to a high priority.
So in this particular case I have set two different things to a particular priority.
Now all we're doing here is setting it based on the criteria that this little SOHO router allows me
to do.
So you need to be aware that different routers and especially more advanced routers are going to be
taking advantage of very powerful utilities and protocols.
But for the Net plus we're good enough from here.