Use proper buffer sizes, enable hardware acceleration, and optimize network settings.
Use proper buffer sizes, enable hardware acceleration, and optimize network settings.
Still entirely managed by the ISPs. The main issue arises when output queues reach capacity on switches or routers, which affects traffic upstream. Purchasing a router to tackle bufferbloat is merely a superficial solution. While you might be able to throttle TCP speeds, it only maintains connections temporarily. Latency and speed will remain poor. Consider a major backbone we operate—about 700 customers rely on a 1gig DSL connection. That’s the limit. By month’s end, we’ll face a surge of 1.6 gigabits trying to pass during peak times. The switches are overwhelmed by full buffers, not by the users. No router with QoS capabilities can resolve this. Even if traffic hit 1gig, the improvements will be negligible. Latency won’t improve. In the UK, some telcos offer higher limits, but in the US and globally it’s different. The goal is a 6:1 ratio between downstream demand and available bandwidth, which many ISPs already follow. Access devices are moving toward 40 gigabits, so over-subscription isn’t an option soon. Until then, it’s up to ISPs to keep their equipment running and upgrade when needed. Bufferbloat isn’t something a router can fix.
No its not all on the ISPs end, bufferbloat mitigation has to happen (to work fully) at BOTH SIDES. But by artificially limiting TCP traffic at the router, it can trigger congestion control earlier than relying on each client realising there is a bottleneck, mitigating the problem. Your router controls the upload rate, if you throttle your upload traffic to below the upload rate of your broadband connection with sufficiently low buffers (or use QoS to give latency sensitive traffic top priority so it always jumps the queue) it reduces the latency on your upload traffic as it keeps flowing. Generally this means throttling TCP traffic so you always have enough spare capacity for UDP to pass through rather than getting dropped. If you DON'T limit the upload then it buffers as your router typically can process it quicker than your actual upload speed. Without QoS that means packets get dropped and with UDP gaming traffic that means lag. I'm not aware of any UK telcos that undersubscribe, it used to be 20:1 for business and 50:1 for residential on ADSL. So when contention kicks in you are still SOL, but if its just your own connection contending with your line rate, they mitigate it by throttling the traffic to slightly below your line rate. But again, that only fixes one direction, to reduce game latency you have to throttle both directions and your router needs to control the upload. Although I know on VDSL in the UK when they used to use a dedicated modem rather than a combined router/modem, the telco hard-coded QoS in the modem to keep the upload rate 1Mbit below the line rate. I know it works because when I had 4Mbit ADSL and first adopted QoS I was able to watch Xbox Video streaming without causing any noticable impact to the rest of the network performance. Before that everything would grind to a crawl. So suggesting that QoS "doesn't work" is absolutely bonkers! So to summarise, yes in SOME cases it CAN be your ISP that is contended, but most often than not its simply that your router is not being efficient in how it decides to deal with your traffic. https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/blo...fferbloat/ You can easily see it at work, for example I download torrents regularly and never notice any impact on my network performance. Before using QoS, browsing was horrific and my ping would be +100ms if just my download was being maxed out. As for the OP, SQM is resource intensive so it could be your router just wasn't up to it. Or it could be your ISP is overloaded, in which case the other poster is correct in that there is nothing you can do to fix that. In my friends case it did still improve his connection even though his speed maxed out the routers CPU causing it to be slightly lower than it should be.