Bandwidth Management for Home Networks

Once you have everything you need for your home network, there's only the configuration left to do. Creating and perfecting your QoS ruleset can take you a few minutes to several days, depending on your experience, needs, and the firmware you chose. However a good setup will save you lots of time and trouble in the future.

For starters you'll want to give higher priority to programs that suffer from insufficient bandwidth: be it games, voice communication or simple web browsing. Give the lowest priority to file downloads and p2p programs. Most custom firmware (such as Tomato) has L7 filters which allow you to simply choose applications to prioritize from a drop-down list. Alternatively, you can prioritize traffic coming from a specific port or IP adress. For example, to prioritize web browsing you will want to give higher priority to port 80 (http).

The exact process of setting up the QoS rules depends on the router and firmware you're using. You should be able to find this information on your router's manual (if you're using the default firmware) or on the homepage of the firmware maker (if you're using a custom one).

One important tip to remember is to always set the upload speed in your QoS settings to 80% - 90% of the maximum your line is capable of. This is so your router can prioritize outgoing traffic properly. Never set it to 100% of your actual upload speed.

That's it - enjoy! If you still get lag, tweak your settings by further reducing priority of bandwidth-hungry aplications until you don't have to worry about slow internet . It's all about how you divide and prioritize the web traffic! Your regular web browsing, for example, doesn't need much bandwidth but requires a high priority; and it's the vice versa for big file downloads.

Check the homepages of the according firmware for more information, or visit the Linksys forums for helpful tips and discussions.