I've been getting terrible speeds for a while now, but had just chalked it up to Comcast overselling their bandwidth. Then I had occasion where I had my computer hooked directly up to my modem for a few days and noticed a huge improvement. I eventually tracked it down to my Airlink AR680W 300N router's QoS setting. Turning it off yielded a huge difference.
Here is my connection with the QoS off:
And here is it with QoS on:
When I first got the router the fact that it had QoS was one of the reasons I purchased it. I wanted to make it so my Bittorrenting didn't interfere with browsing the internet. There aren't any firmware updates available. So I just wanted to know if there is another way to prioritize ports 80 and 53 that doesn't cut my internet speed by 3/4.
Any idea if adjusting settings would do anything for my "high-speed Internet" (DSL -- officially now 1.5-3 Mbps download/768 Kbps upload)?
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The router provide quality of service (QoS) by limiting bandwidth to lower priority protocol like hyper-text transfer protocol (http), post office protocol (pop), and simple mail transfer protocol (smtp). The packets using those protocols can experience delay without sacrificing contents. It keeps bandwidth open for other services that needs to operate with little delay like VoIP. If the packets for VoIP or other streaming media does not arrive in order or on time, they are drop. That causes disruptions and glitches in the stream. QoS usually operate automatically on home routers. Not very important unless you hold conferences over the internet.
Anyway, home routers are made for home use. They are not flexible.
There is one router that I've work with virtually that I'm positive that will allow you to program it to give priority to port 80 (http) and port 53 (dns). That is the Cisco 1841 router. Such router usually cost about $1k to get. Even then, I don't have the expertise yet to program the router to give priority to specific ports.
You could roll your own router with an old computer and one of a few freely-available router packages, like Monowall, or pfsense. Those give you a lot of control and probably won't choke.
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WRT54GL running one of the third-party firmwares (esp. Tomato) works fairly well, though it runs out of steam around 20-megabits or so. Netgear's WNDR3700 runs OpenWRT natively(!) and is very capable.
Uraniun's suggestion of Monowall or pfsense is also spot-on.
cfosspeed is a lan miniport driver that does QoS locally on your computer and can coordinate with other computers on the network to make sure the network isn't overloaded (it works best if there are instances of it on the other computers, but it can react to the usual behaviour as well) - its very lightweight in its resource usage, while offering a lot of flexibility in QoS configuration. After getting it, I've never had bandwidth problems do to the infamous response package delay issue that is at the heart of torrent problems.
They've got a really permissive system if you buy it as well. I've bought it for 5-10€ a couple of years back and am still getting updates for free while having it installed on both my laptop and server.
All in all, I strongly recommend it if you want to have a good QoS service running.
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