Router limits?

botheredbothered Manchester UK
edited March 2006 in Science & Tech
Hi all,
I have a Linksys 54g wireless router with two PCs wired and one wireless. I play a lot of online gaming but can suffer lag if the kids (on the other PCs) are doing any heavy downloading. Is there any way to tell the router to share the bandwidth evenly between PCs to stop the downloads dominating?

Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited March 2006
    The problem you're expressing is a common complaint of SoHo routers from any brand.. 3Com, DLink, Belkin, Linksys.. None of them have true QoS control. QoS stands for Quality of Service, or the reliability/speed/priority of the (L/W)AN traffic you're shuffling around. Proper control of QoS gives you the ability to prioritise specific ports, computers or packet shapes or protocols above that of others. Most SoHo routers treat all traffic equally and process it all with the same priority. Things like BitTorrent which can have hundreds of concurrent connections not only hog the resources of a router, but increase latency while not necessarily taking all the available up/down throughput. Fortunately, you have one of the few residential routers where there is a solution for this problem!

    A company called Sveasoft has taken the GPL-released firmware that Linksys put out some months ago and have modified it. They've released several versions of their firmware over the last two years, and have added a variety of features that are otherwise non-existant for routers of the WRT54g's price segment. The firmware versions, themselves known as Satori, Alchemy, Talisman (etc.) with their various releases introduce awesome things like the QoS control I mentioned, unlimited port forwarding/triggering, better logging, content filtering, a Linux shell, increased power output and more. They've even begun to release different packages of a given firmware series (Talisman is the newest) to make the router into different things: Wireless hotspots, WiFi extenders/repeaters, wireless authentication APs and more. It's all very cool stuff.


    The newest stable and available release is known as the Alchemy series. It successor, the Talisman series, should be released in a few weeks. The firmware itself is "Supposed" to be paid for, but it's a bit of a real legal grey area at the moment as all the code is GPL -- under the terms, they can only make you pay for the finished product with support, but the code has to be released. Therefore other people have picked up the code, compiled it, and released it for free. You'll want to get your hands on a copy of the firmware (I have the latest available) and flash it to your router, then configure the new (Non-existant in the Linksys firmware) QoS section to issue a lower priority to the protocols/traffic styles used by the programs they use. Or, you can use that section to give you cross-the-board priority to the MAC address of the PC you use, so any time you're on, your traffic is considered more important.

    If this sounds right up your alley, I can post links and how-tos.
  • botheredbothered Manchester UK
    edited March 2006
    Cheers Thrax, that sounds like a must have. I'd appriciate the links and all the how to's, the more idiot proof the better.:)
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