Have you ever tried to jump on a video call, only to suffer from a choppy connection because your spouse was streaming 4K videos at the same time? Or maybe you’ve had a gaming session ruined by your brother who wouldn’t pause his torrent downloads?
If so, you’ve probably wished there was a way to configure your router so that you had a smoother experience. The good news is that there is: it’s called Quality of Service. Let’s see how to set up QoS for gaming and what benefits it offers.
What Is Quality of Service?
Quality of Service (QoS) is a mechanism on routers that allows you to prioritize the network traffic you see as most important. Using it, you can make sure that your available bandwidth is used for the most critical applications instead of being wasted on activities that aren’t time-sensitive.
Think of your network as a busy highway between your devices and the internet. Quality of Service is similar to dividing that highway into transit, carpool, and emergency service lanes. Only certain types of traffic are allowed in certain lanes, and some lanes will get to where they’re going with fewer delays.
Of course, the highway still has a maximum number of lanes in each direction, and making one of them a carpool lane won’t increase the amount of total traffic the highway can handle. It just makes it easier for some of the traffic to move more smoothly.
Likewise, QoS won’t make your internet connection faster and it won’t expand your total bandwidth throughput. It’s meant to make sure that certain apps and services have enough room to move when the network is congested.
Video calling tools like Zoom, as well as online gaming platforms, are services that are sensitive to either latency or bandwidth. This means they can benefit from QoS settings.
Understanding Latency and Bandwidth
Latency, often measured as “ping,” is a measurement of the delay in communication between you and the device you’re talking with over a network. You may have had phone calls where you’ve noticed a major delay between you saying something and the other person hearing it. This is an example of high latency.
Bandwidth, meanwhile, is the maximum rate at which you can download or upload data. This is limited by the speed of your home internet connection. Think of it like the size of a pipe—the larger the diameter, the more water can flow through it at once.
Between latency and bandwidth, applications will generally be more sensitive to one or the other.
Gaming is extremely latency-sensitive but generally not bandwidth-sensitive. You’ve surely noticed this if you’ve ever tried playing a game with high latency (often called “lag”). This happens when playing on a server in another continent, for example. Your actions will take a long time to manifest in the game, or elements may jump all over the place while the game tries to catch up and compensate.
Video streaming is very bandwidth-sensitive but not that latency-sensitive. Each video source has a bitrate, which is the amount of data that it transfers per period of time, typically measured in bits per second. The higher the resolution of video, the greater its bitrate. If the bandwidth available is less than the required bitrate, the video will stop and have to buffer when it runs out of loaded data.
These are the sorts of services that are given top priority by Quality of Service mechanisms, as they’re the most frustrating if they don’t run smoothly. You’ll usually give lower priority to traffic like BitTorrent downloads, which isn’t often urgent. Activities like web browsing tend to fall somewhere in the middle.
How Quality of Service Works
Because services are often disrupted by high latency and low bandwidth, Quality of Service can increase performance either by reducing latency or freeing up bandwidth. Each one has its own technique, but the two often work in tandem to increase overall network performance.
Different kinds of traffic will benefit from different mechanisms, depending on whether that traffic is latency-sensitive, bandwidth-sensitive, or both.
Queuing (Latency)
Queuing is the main mechanism used to reduce latency for high-priority traffic. A queue allows the router to keep traffic buffered when it’s not yet ready to be processed.
Quality of Service rules may allow packets (chunks of network data) from high-priority services or applications to jump the queue and get processed first. This helps reduce latency for those important services and applications.
Rate Limiting (Bandwidth)
If too many packets try to enter the queue at once, the buffer will overflow and packets can be lost. Rate limiting (also known as packet shaping) restricts the number of packets that the queue will accept from a particular source, automatically dropping any extras that the source tries to send it.
This forces the source to reduce the number of packets that it attempts to send, effectively limiting the bandwidth afforded to that source. Low-priority traffic sources may be specifically limited, whereas a high-priority service may cause all other traffic to become rate limited (“throttled”) to free up bandwidth.
Setting Up Quality of Service
The vast majority of Quality of Service mechanisms are handled via your router. Because it’s the tool that connects your other devices to the internet, it’s the perfect spot to look at incoming data and sort that data to the different devices on the network.
With Wi-Fi, there’s a chance you’re already using QoS. Some devices and routers support a protocol called Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) that automatically sorts data into four categories: Voice, Video, Best Effort, and Background (in descending order of priority).
Most routers have some form of Quality of Service capability built in, though some are more sophisticated than others. The specific options you have will depend on your router.
You’ll usually find it somewhere in the Advanced section of your router’s control panel. On our TP-Link router, for instance, it’s under Advanced > QoS. Note that other features, such as NAT Boost in our case, must be turned off for QOS to work.
Types of Data Priorities
There are two main ways to assign Quality of Service priorities: a per-device basis and a per-application basis.
Priority by Device
You may decide that a particular device, such as a gaming console, should be given priority over all others. Every device has a few elements that make it uniquely identifiable on a network: an IP address, a MAC address, and a name.
Because a device’s MAC address is unique and can’t be changed, this is generally the best way to identify it. But if necessary, you can use the other elements, depending on your router. You may need to add devices manually, or might be able to just change settings for a list of devices that your router provides.
On our TP-Link router, enabling QoS allows you to mark any device as Priority by enabling a slider. You can then change the Timing to set how long the device is treated that way. At the top of the page, you should also input your upload and download speeds so the service can work its best.
Priority by Application
Another type of QoS assigns priority based on which port or app a piece of data wants to go to. Instead of prioritizing an entire device’s traffic, it only prioritizes a certain type of data.
For example, if you know that all your BitTorrent traffic goes through port 54321, you may set a rule that port 54321 has low priority. Thus, it should only be given bandwidth after all other apps have gotten the bandwidth they need.
Conversely, you may set a rule saying that Skype on port 33333 should be given highest priority so its traffic is not only processed first (in order to reduce latency), but is also given as much bandwidth as it needs (in order to reduce video choppiness).
Try Quality of Service Yourself
Quality of Service helps latency-sensitive traffic (like gaming) and bandwidth-sensitive traffic (like video calling) bypass network congestion and allows everything to perform more smoothly, even with a busy network.
You can either configure it on an app-by-app basis or give top priority to a specific device. Your router probably has some form of Quality of Service capability built in, so why not give it a try to help your top devices perform when you need them most?
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