Question How to configure QoS

Mar 2, 2019
Hello so here is my problem our house is a hostel so with all the people that connect to the wifi it gets really bad so i want to configure bandwidth control but i didnt found anything close on my router but i have Qos but i dont know how to configure it.
By default on my router is on but dscp mark is "no change (-1)"
I got a lot of options for dscp mark like af,cs with various numbers but i dont know any if that. Any help?Thanks
First thing completely ignore anything related to DSCP or any other form of packet marking. This should not even be on a router designed for a home user especially one that only connects to the internet. DSCP is used internally in corporate networks where you have full control of all the network devices.

Even if you set any of those values the second it gets to the ISP they remove them all. Even if they were used on the internet everyone would set their traffic to whatever value of DSCP was "best"

So even though the router manufactures fill up whole pages of things you can set they all do nothing.

I strongly suspect by the way you describe the setting on the QoS page you have a very basic router. These devices have almost no ability to do anything with traffic. Pretty much they have some silly high/medium/low concept which they never really define and it can only control UPLOAD traffic. Most people are exceeding their download traffic.

You need a fairly advanced router to even attempt to control download traffic. It is not a easy topic because not all traffic is really equal. You need to determine which traffic is really more important and which is less. This needs to be agreed upon by all people using the connection...or maybe better said paying for the connection. It takes different configurations to make say netflix or skype video calls work compared to say online games.
Mar 2, 2019
Ok makes sense, yeah my router is really old. Well maybe is the time to change it. Thank you for the explanation.
Before you get real far talk to the other people and see what they are doing. If for example you have 10 people all watching netflix on a small internet connection QoS will not solve that you are out of bandwidth. All you could really do is say these 5 people can watch netflix and the others can not. This is very different than if you have one person downloading lots of files and a couple people watching netflix. In that case you can limit the download guy to a lower speed and everything will work fine. Things like netflix you can not reduce the amount of data it needs to function or you get buffering and stalls.

So your first step is to figure out what traffic you have and what you would do about it.....assuming you the person could be the router. You could then look for a router that could implement your plan. Be aware QoS is really stupid unless you want to do lots of programming. It can't for example say user A can use all the bandwidth they want except when user B is watching youtube.

In many cases the only real solution is to buy more bandwidth. QoS is really only useful when something out of the ordinary happens, like microsoft decides to download patches on a bunch of your machines at the same time.
Sounds like it.

A modern router with QOS is friendlier, u don't have to know about any of that arcane packet marking stuff, all that is going to show you is TYPE OF TRAFFIC, even as specific as NETFLIX traffic, and what priority do you want assigned to it? In a lodging situation I assume you want, at least, to provide reliable basic service, browsing, email etc. and if you have enough bandwidth THEN allow VOIP, video etc. that would be my priority. So having a limited bandwidth, I'd configure Browsing high priority, VOIP medium priority, Video Low Priority, Peer-to-Peer DISABLED, and spell out on your Guests Service sheet, "Internet provided for basic services only." so they won't be calling you, how come my Netflix doesn't work?

For reference, I use the very popular pfsense and it gives me 3 full pages of traffic options I can select and have control over.
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whats your internet bandwidth? For qos to work well you don't want any bottlenecks in front or behind.

ideally your wifi should work > than your isp bandwidth. if you have really poor connections in parts of your home then it will bottleneck.
to make sure the isp side doesn't bottleneck you will have to limit your connection to 80% or higher if you're lucky.
All buffering has to happen at the router or it can't control anything.

this router can handle 100Mbs QoS.
openwrt, ERX, or ipfire are the best options. ERX is the least expensive, $50, and works out of the box. openwrt has cake qos which will work better with dsl, you will have to flash a router to get this, speeds will vary depending on the cpu speed. ipfire works with any internet speed and it has a gui for configuring class based rules, which is more optional. ipfire will cost you $250+ for a basic computer to run it on.

class based qos doesn't work that well on < 10Mbs for these specific qdisc. the classless works fine. if your speeds are that low 10 ppl sharing will still suck no matter what. in general you want 5Mbs+ per person using it.

configuring class based qos is fairly difficult. p2p is nearly impossible to do (ipfire tries)
Just adding the akamai network into tier4 alone will help a ton.
you can video streaming services into tier 2.

tier1: voip, acks
tier2: media streams
tier3: default
tier4: downloads, vpn

the idea is if a particular service is running slow you can look up it's CIDR ranges and then add it into one of the tier's otherwise it's in default. if you can identify something bogging down the network then add it's CIDR into tier4.

if p2p is a huge problem you can block the trackers using ipfire. then they can use a vpn which will get throttled very well.
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