In many households today, broadband Internet connections are used not only for e-mail and Web browsing, but also to stream music and video, play online games and/or perhaps make voice calls using a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service.
You may have several PCs on your home network, as well as some combination of a gaming console like the Xbox 360, an iPhone or other handheld device, and perhaps a streaming music player such as the Squeezebox or a streaming video player such as the Roku. (And with the holiday gift-giving season upon us, it's possible you'll collect more devices soon.) While some of these devices may have a wired connection to your router, most tap in wirelessly.
So what happens when one person wants to listen to music, another wants to watch a movie and still another wants to play an online game all at once? If you've never tweaked your router's firmware, you might experience performance problems. What's more, many wireless routers leave the factory with some of their best features disabled. I'll show you how to change your router's configuration so that you can take full advantage of its capabilities.
Why router settings matter
By default, a wireless router maximizes the rate at which it transfers data. This is desirable when you're transferring files from point A to point B using a protocol like TCP because you want to move files as fast as possible. If the router begins dropping too many packets, it simply throttles its link rate down until the packet loss abates — and then it begins ramping up all over again.
Dropped packets and seesawing link rates aren't a big deal when you're downloading files from the Internet or moving them around your local network because the packets are automatically resent. It also doesn't matter if some packets arrive out of order, because you're not going to access the file until the data transfer is complete anyway.
Dropped and out-of-order packets are a big problem, however, if they occur while you're streaming a movie, listening to music, or speaking to someone using a VoIP service like Vonage or Skype. Applications such as these require a sustainable link rate with as few dropped packets as possible; consistency is the key here, not raw speed.
Sending high-definition video from a PC in your den to a media player in your living room, for instance, typically consumes between 20 and 25 megabits per second of network bandwidth. That shouldn't a problem for today's 802.11n routers, which promise theoretical bandwidth of up to 300Mbit/sec.In reality, problems such as dropped packets, out-of-order packets and jitter (packets arriving at different rates of speed) can cause pixilation, stuttering, visual dropouts, soundtracks losing sync with video, and all sorts of other problems.
Concurrent traffic on your network also has an impact. You probably won't enjoy watching a movie streamed from Netflix if your teenager is exchanging massive files using BitTorrent at the same time, for instance.
Fortunately, there is a solution that delivers optimal performance for everyone in the house. Unless your router is very old, it has firmware settings that can be configured to instruct it to assign packets associated with streaming media traffic (music, video, games and the like) a higher priority than packets associated with data-file traffic (documents, spreadsheets, digital photos and so on), based on the assumption that these data types aren't as time sensitive.
These settings are collectively known as “quality of service” (QoS). Enabling and tweaking QoS settings is a balancing act: It can make some network-oriented applications run more smoothly, but only at the expense of other applications. It is, however, the best means of allocating your network's bandwidth.
Unfortunately, there is no standard user interface for changing QoS settings. The Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) specification, which is supported by nearly every modern router, is supposed to prioritize network traffic according to four access categories: from highest to lowest priority, these are voice, video, best effort and background. In order for this to work, however, WMM must be enabled in both the router's firmware and in the client's Wi-Fi adapter.
In addition, each application (such as the media server in a network-attached storage box) must embed two bits in each packet to inform the router of its priority. However, few real-world applications other than VoIP services embed these bits, which renders WMM rather useless for applications other than voice. And that's why you'll need to tweak your router's QoS settings on your own. Here's how.
Step by step: Tweaking your router's settings
It's not at all unusual for a router manufacturer to release new firmware updates over the router's useful life. These updates typically include rudimentary bug fixes and performance enhancements, but they sometimes include entirely new functions that didn't exist when the router was first shipped. Either way, it's always a good idea to make sure you have the latest version.
Before configuring your router's QoS settings, check the support pages on the manufacturer's Web site to see if any new firmware is available. If there is a new version, follow the instructions you'll find there to download and install it.
I'm using D-Link's Xtreme-N DIR-655 wireless router as an example in this story, simply because it's a very popular model that's still available at retail outlets three years after its initial rollout; it also continues to receive firmware updates. Much of the DIR-655's QoS technology was developed by a third party, Ubicom, and can also be found in selected routers manufactured by Netgear, Cisco, Trendnet, and others. If you're using another brand, the screens may look different, but the optimization options should basically be the same; you might just have to poke around to find them.
To get started, type the router's IP address into your browser of choice and hit Enter. The DIR-655's default IP address is 192.168.0.1, but I previously changed this router's address to 192.168.1.1 because the original address conflicted with my DSL modem.
(If you don't know your router's IP address, refer to its documentation. The most common router IP addresses are 192.168.1.1 for Linksys routers, 192.168.0.1 for D-Link and Netgear routers, 192.168.2.1 for Belkin routers and 192.168.11.1 for Buffalo routers. If you've changed the default IP address and don't remember what you changed it to, you might have to reset the router to its factory-default values.)
Type in your admin password to access the router's settings. If you've never created an admin password, now would be a good time.
