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My brother is driving me crazy with his online streaming addiction, and since am paying the net bills, i only allowed him to use 20% of the bandwidth so he wont mess with my net time.

Am doing that after i got hold of his laptop and instealled NetLimiter, disabled tray icon, task manager and control panel so he can't delete it.

However am wondering if there is a way to do this through the router, i know there is, but i looked all over my settings and didn't find any field that is related to the bandwidth control, the closest one to the info available online is this QoS page :

enter image description here

do you think its possible ?

I can add more pictures of other pages if its needed, i also don't know the exact model of my router as its not written anywhere ("150M Wireless N" maybe ?)

Thank you and have a good day

Edit here is the Help page of the Advanced Setting the VLAN part is talking about some bandwidth control, here is the a screen shots of that page

EDIT 2 Access Management Screenshots

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  • Can you post a screenshot of the "Access Management" tab?
    – Spiff
    Jan 23, 2017 at 22:56
  • By the way, what are your specific problems? Do you have metered Internet service, so his usage costs you more money? Or is it that you don't get the bandwidth that you need while he's streaming? Or is the problem that your connection become laggy while he's streaming?
    – Spiff
    Jan 23, 2017 at 22:58
  • @Spiff added, and the problem is the latter, when he streams my internet get really slow (he watch 720p shows, and we only have 8mb/s ) Jan 23, 2017 at 23:25

1 Answer 1

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Congestion should never cause lag. If congestion causes lag, it is a sign your equipment has a well-known bug called bufferbloat. That's when a network box lets its queues of packet/frame buffers grow and grow which adds lots of lag, without every dropping a packet, which accidentally keeps TCP's congestion control algorithms from ever seeing that congestion is happening and needs to be controlled. So it keeps Congestion Control from kicking in to fix the congestion, and just adds lag because all the new frames have to wait behind a long queue of older frames before they can be transmitted.

To solve bufferbloat, you have basically 3 options:

  1. Install firmware on your router that has an anti-bufferbloat queueing (a.k.a. "Smart Queueing", an advanced form of what used to be called Active Queue Management or AQM) algorithm such as FQ-CoDel, and enable it. This usually means installing an aftermarket Linux-based open source firmware distro such as OpenWrt, DD-WRT, etc.
  2. Replace your router with one that has Smart Queueing (FQ-CoDel).
  3. If you can't firmware-upgrade or replace your router for some reason, you can buy a second router to go between the router you're stuck with and the rest of your network, and set up FQ-CoDel and bandwidth shaping on that router, so that it acts as a slight bottleneck on your connection, so FQ-CoDel can drop packets or do Explicit Congestion Notification to allow TCP Congestion Control to kick in, before any bloated buffer queues can build up anywhere on the network. IQrouter is a turn-key solution that automates all the tuning for you.

Beware common bad advice: Many people are unaware that congestion should never cause lag; they just think it's a natural fact of congestion that you just have to live with if you sometimes saturate your link. Such uninformed people often attempt to work around the symptoms by deploying strict QoS limitations on the users/devices/protocols/apps that seem to be using the most bandwidth, but that's a hassle and can add its own set of problems rather than solving the root cause.

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  • thanks for the heavy details man, but this is really "a lot" of networking for me to digest lol, and you kinda lost me on something here, how does "congestion should never cause lag ?" that's exactly what the word mean (talking abt the english language) if my brother is streaming a video at 700KB/s , then shouldn't i be only left with 100KB/s ? how can we both use our entire 800KB/s at the same time without feeling any difference ? Jan 24, 2017 at 2:14
  • Most of the time when the network "feels slow" when it's overloaded, it's not because you're not getting enough bandwidth, it's because your new connections take too long to get started because of bufferbloat-induced latency (lag) increases. So each click on a web page, and each html/js/css/img resource load attempt per page, takes too long to start, but ends up going "fast enough" once it starts. To test this hypothesis, run dslreports.com/speedtest once when the network is idle, and again while he's streaming, and see how different the results are.
    – Spiff
    Jan 24, 2017 at 19:47

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