Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (686 mails)

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Re: [opensuse] Ideas on network prioritization?
On 7/11/2013 2:40 PM, John Andersen wrote:
On 7/11/2013 2:11 PM, Marc Chamberlin wrote:
Hi - I am running openSuSE12.3 on my gateway computer for my SOHO network. We
have a number of hybrid cell phones around here that can
connect either via our wireless network using VOIP to connect to other
telephones or they can use the phone companies regular 3G network
(but we are discouraged from doing so in order to keep costs down). We noticed
that when using the WiFi connection, we often get a lot of
dropouts and broken/lost connections, particularly when heavy network traffic
such as backups are going on. My question is this, Is there
any way to prioritize network traffic such that when a cell phone conversation
is going on, that cell phone is given higher priority over
all other network traffic?

I am using a DCHP server and could set it up to assign a specific IP address (I
think) to each cell phone presuming they have a MAC address
or a unique identifier, if that would help. I have started poking my nose into
IPTables, but finding it difficult to understand or get a
handle on whether there is a way to prioritize network traffic using it. And I
am not sure I want to simply give a cell phone high priority
as these are smart phones and I would prefer phone conversations have high
priority, not cell phone apps. Appreciate any pointers/thoughts
on this, thanks in advance and please keep in mind that I am not an expert on
networking so try to keep your replies somewhat simple if you
can... ;-)


Well without getting into iptables (if you aren't going to be able to
prioritize traffic on a single network.

So you might look into two networks.
You could start by moving your wifi router (or adding another wifi router for
use only with phones) outside of
your in-house network.

So something like Premise Router---wifi---->house-Server---->house-network
Keep only phones on that wifi, and have another wifi for laptops etc on

That takes your voice traffic totally off the inhouse network where it won't
have to contend with backups.

(This should work even better than iptables prioritization, because it avoids a
lot of in-net-contention.

Thanks John, James for the suggestion to use a separate router, that sounds like a good choice to me and I have set up a separate router as you suggest. Hopefully that will make our cell phone usage better. Much appreciated!!!


"The Truth is out there" - Spooky

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