how do home / SOHO grade routers do 'qos'

[wintermute000]

What the heck are the dlink/netgears/belkins of the world doing when they offer 'QoS' on their home/SOHO grade kit?


- there is only 1 router facing the internet
- there is no control of your upstream egress
- you're dealing often with variable speed links e.g. ADSL or badly contended connections, and I hardly think they got adapative QOS working better than Cisco LOL
- they often claim to be able to QoS downloads, are they shaping the output of the LAN port(s), or playing with TCP windows like Riverbeds, or what?


So how the heck do they 'qos' anything when in a classic enterprise QoS scenario none of the tools are available? You don't control both ends of the link and your carrier isn't participating, you don't even define the overall shaper or queues or anything, WTF


I've noticed for example on my home netgear, if I 'Qos for gaming', it actually shapes my UPLOADS of everything else to 500kb (and its using dumb layer-4 not layer-7 DPI), how the f--k is that QoS

[Dieselboy]

I've often wondered this and dismissed it for the same reasons you mentioned. From your experience, I guess we can assume most or all of the cheap "home" stuff is going to be the same crappiness.

I had a problem with a Draytek router back in about 2008 or thereabouts. Internet speed tests were being really weird and not to the capacity. I went hunting through the gui admin pages of the router and I found something which was kind of related to qos but not exactly. So I turned all that rubbish off and everything was working spot on afterwards. Draytek is almost on-par with the Cisco 870/880 series routers I've found.

[LynK]

I'll give you a good real word scenario.

Timmy and his wife Winny only have a 20/5 internet.

Timmy notices Winny uses all the BW when on netflix. So Timmy decides to shape her traffic to only use 5mbps. So timmy can enjoy 15mbps GAMING IT UP!

[deanwebb]

I'll give you a good real word scenario.

Timmy and his wife Winny only have a 20/5 internet.

Timmy notices Winny uses all the BW when on netflix. So Timmy decides to shape her traffic to only use 5mbps. So timmy can enjoy 15mbps GAMING IT UP!

So... you're saying policing is more important than shaping... innnnnteresting...

[LynK]

policing is absolutely NOWHERE near as good as shaping. A delayed TCP segment, is always better than a dropped, and resent.


You would be surprised what some of these SOHO routers can do.

[wintermute000]

So aside from shaping or policing non prioritised traffic what else do they do?

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[LynK]

So aside from shaping or policing non prioritised traffic what else do they do?

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Some of them have pretty neat .1x features. I know cisco implemented a decent guest portal feature set in some of their smaller models. SOHO will never compare to low end enterprise grade. But they have their marketplace, and if you get a decent product, you can also get decent features. Some of the nicer SOHO have built in radius servers.

[Dieselboy]

So aside from shaping or policing non prioritised traffic what else do they do?

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I guess it's up to each vendor how far they want to go? My general feeling is that it might not do as you want.

[LynK]

unfortunately, most SOHO vendors make some of their features gimmicky. I would just get a 5506-X or a PAN 220 to be honest. You can get them for around 500 bucks with all of the licensing...

[Dieselboy]

I don't think the ASA -X series can do shaping! I went to do this on my ASA5515-X and the config isnt' there. I used to do this on the 5510's back in the UK I'm pretty sure..

[LynK]

They (ASA) can't do traffic shaping, but they can do policing. I believe that in order to do shaping you need multi-cored infrastructure.

[wintermute000]

ASAs are garbage in 2017. Heck even Cisco has finally officially stated its Firepower (sourcefire) or bust.

Let me count the ways: no zoning, terrible GUI, terrible reporting, no routed VPNs, inferior L7/IPS/AV etc., no native on-box URL filtering, bolt on sourcefire look ma a second VM to manage and hook inline, no shaping, did I mention its still using ACLs in 2017? etc.