You may see the term when there is talk of routers, yet to many, they are unsure what the feature is, and what it’s supposed to do.
Quality of service (QoS) is supposed to prioritize any traffic that is more important than other traffic. For a single user, you may not see too much difference if this is on or off.
However, once you have more than one device connecting to a home network, they are all fighting for the same slice of bandwidth.
If your online activities comprise online gaming, VOIP calls, video calling or something as innocent as streaming, then QoS can help prevent buffering or lag on your connection.
Here you can find out all you need to know about what is quality of service in networking.
You can also learn if it will make any difference to your connection and to your applications that need high levels of bandwidth, compared to low priority traffic such as browsing.
What is QoS and How it Works?
Quality of Service can be an excellent feature that will enable you to train your router to determine which apps ought to have a larger share of the available network bandwidth.
If you have several users and have good QoS rules set, then you should see little buffering when streaming video as you are downloading torrents or one of the family is gaming.
On home networks, bandwidth is shared as required between users.
On a regular connection, you could be using Skype and then one of the kid’s logs into Netflix. All of a sudden, your Skype call begins to break up. (Learn how to delete your Skype account)
The reason for this is your router is trying to balance the load between not just the two services, but trying to offer both users the equal amounts of bandwidth.
Many users forget they may have, for example, a 100 Mb connection. However, once another user connects, then this 100 MB is shared, and so forth. Once you have four possible users, you drop from 100 MB to 25 MB, with each sending the same network traffic.
QoS aims to balance the load by activity rather than user number.
How Do I Enable QoS on My Router?
Every make of router is different in their configuration pages; and how you will locate the router QoS settings.
Newer routers may have automatic settings, while older models may require you to set them manually.
It can, in reality, be more than flicking a toggle switch to change your network traffic. You may need to understand upload and download speeds you have from your ISP before you can configure the router QoS settings.
While it sounds good on paper, you can quickly get it wrong and make your connection perform much worse for everyone.
The first steps you need to take are to make sure you are comfortable with accessing your router. To do this, you need to type 192.168.1.1 into your browser, or the IP address your router uses for the default.
Once you are here, you have several pages that contain plenty of numbers and settings you can change. However, most are set and changing them accidentally can break your connection.
Should I Enable QoS On My Router?
You may find quite a discussion here as to the benefits of QoS for your network. The feature was designed for heavy use networks, and then the speeds were far slower than they were today.
Besides this, you can find different routers perform differently from each other depending on the make. What is QoS Netgear compared to another brand? You can find some models have this setting turned on by default, and it can severely restrict your upload speeds.
Your router will determine you don’t need to have priority for uploading.
Besides this, router manufacturers are unsure that QoS has a place any more with many higher connections speeds that were previously possible. Once you begin hitting speeds in the region of hundreds of Mbps, the QoS feature isn’t necessary.
To find out if it is suitable for your home network, you do need to find out your current speed, and then enable QoS, or disable if already enabled. You can then do another speed test and see if there is any difference.
Alternative to QoS
It can be hard for many users to delve into their router settings to change the QoS rule and then find it doesn’t make any use to their connection speeds.
Either way, there is the chance with a little knowledge; you have the opportunity to enable or disable QoS in a router.
However, there is one way you can make things far more straightforward. If there is lots of streaming, your ISP may throttle your connection, and once they do this, it doesn’t matter if you have QoS setup or not. You will have a slower connection.
Premium VPN’s can do something very similar, and at the same time prevent your ISP from throttling your connection.
With data that is encrypted, an ISP won’t know what you are doing; however, you can use what is called Split Tunnelling and is a feature in many premium VPN’s.
With this, you can connect to your streaming service, your online games, or any other online activity that needs priority bandwidth. The rest of your connection data can pass through regular channels without interfering with the connection passing through your VPN’s network.
Once you select the best premium VPN, which happens to be the easiest VPN to use, you can install this on multiple devices, and from there all data that is a priority or sensitive can be taken care of by your VPN.
You can quickly prioritize traffic from your desktop, and select the applications you wish to divert without any need to dive into your router settings.
