5 Reasons Why You Should Set Up QoS Prioritization On Your Router For Better Internet

Technology has long been about simplifying complex and monotonous tasks, and as Wi-Fi routers continue to grow more refined, complex features become more accessible. Our home internet connections are a shared resource, whether you’re sharing 5G bandwidth with others in your area, or if you have dozens of devices at home and multiple people in the house trying to use the internet at once. Quality of Service (QoS) allows you to prioritize specific devices or services on your network, to keep your connection quality high even when your connection is operating near its limit.

QoS setup can’t work miracles, but it can make your connection feel snappier, which can help if you work from home, play competitive games online, or just want to fully embrace smart home tech. The more devices you load your network with, the more trouble your internet will have keeping up, but luckily, setting your priorities with a QoS on a modern router can help out quite a bit.Slow internet

No gigabit at your house? Make the most of your connection

Even if you’ve upgraded to one of the best Wi-Fi routers with plenty of power to handle all of your devices, the internet connection coming into your home may not be up to the challenge it faces there. While full duplex fiber connections can handle the needs of most homes with bandwidth to spare, there are still a lot of people on slower connections that could become fully saturated when everyone is at home surfing. What’s more, some ISPs can struggle to deliver their full speed during peak time periods, which is another way of saying your connection quality could be at its worst when you want to use it the most.

Setting your QoS with your most important devices prioritized can keep them working as expected, even when you’re using most of all of your connection speed. For example, if your connection is closer to 15Mbps, which is normally capable of streaming HD video comfortably, you might see a lot of buffering if you try to stream while flipping through an infinite queue of video shorts. If you’ve got large downloads for work, you could also keep working on another device while that download finishes. However, that’s a big deal for video games which can take hours to download on anything but the fastest connections around. Or, when it creates ping to the detriment of your performance.

4 Improve online gaming

When every millisecond counts

AmpliFi Alien allows for QoS settings by individually labeling devices as normal, streaming, or gaming.

If you play online games, especially more competitive games like Valorant or Fortnite, you want a connection with ping times that are low and consistent. A QoS optimized for gaming will prioritize your connection to the gaming server, either by prioritizing your devices, or by identifying the gaming service and prioritizing that connection as seen with some gaming routers. When you’re playing a match online, you don’t need much bandwidth, but making sure your packets arrive on time with as little latency as possible can keep your gaming experience running smoothly.

While servers for popular games have been optimized for lower-quality home internet connections, a good ping can mean fewer unregistered shots and deaths that feel fairer, so you can stop blaming your internet lag and start blaming your monitor and mouse when you lose – that is, unless you’ve picked up one of the best gaming monitors or the best wireless gaming mouse.

3 Work from home meetings

Can you see my screen?

A lot of people have transitioned to working from home, making a stable home internet connection all the more important. You can set your QoS to prioritize your work computer to keep your connection working properly. While working from home may not seem all that demanding, there are quite a few tasks that need a good connection. If, for example, you need to remote into your work computer using a VPN, a strong connection can keep that working smoothly. Also, if you need to attend a work meeting on Zoom, Teams, or similar, a faster connection means clearer screen sharing and less time asking if people can hear you.

If you’re finding that your connection just isn’t strong enough in your recently converted home office, or you just want to be able to work from other places around your home with a steady signal, picking up one of the best mesh Wi-Fi systems could help improve your coverage. Luckily, a lot of these kits also include a decent QoS.

2 Online backups

Preserve your precious upload speed

A lot of us have transitioned to cloud backups for our phones and computers, which can take up quite a bit of bandwidth. Cloud backups can have a big impact on speed, because many home internet connections offer faster download speeds than uploads. Even if your download speed is measured in the hundreds of megabits per second, your upload speed may be less than 10Mbps. Upload speed is also used for things like streaming your gameplay to Twitch, and video chatting with friends.

Since a lot of backups and updates happen when you plug in a device and leave it unattended, that means that a lot of us are syncing our cloud backups during peak times, exactly when we want to be streaming. Setting your QoS similarly affects upload speeds, so you can make sure your gaming connection isn’t consumed by an iCloud backup.

1 Smart home enthusiasts

Modernize your home without giving up network performance

If you’re all in on smart home tech with bulbs, power outlets, cameras, sensors, and more, you may find your home network struggling over the ballooning number of devices you’ve added to it. While smart home tech, apart from cameras, generally will require very little data, the constant updates they do need can impact response time and lead to an increase in average ping times, hurting the responsiveness of your network.

There are a lot of things you can do in addition to enabling your QoS to improve your connection, such as setting up a dedicated IoT network. For the most part, however, if you’ve set up a dozen cameras around your home, you want them to have a strong connection as well. Luckily, powerful routers like the TP-Link Archer BE800, as well as cheaper models like the Asus RT-AX88U Pro, have plenty of capacity for all of these devices, so prioritizing some of your devices doesn’t significantly impact the usability of others.

Configure your router for stability, not speed

Different routers and software versions handle QoS features differently. Some simpler models will ask you to configure devices individually with set speeds, while some others may offer simpler on/off setups, while removing some of the customizations. Still, others will let you set simple prioritization categories for devices, such as setting a game console as a gaming device, an Apple TV as a streaming device, and your ThinkPad as a work device. Still, others may simply have the option to set individual devices as a higher priority to receive bandwidth.

When you’re setting up your router, make sure to check for a specific QoS option in the app or the web browser settings. If you’re setting device priority, you may need to start with the list of connected devices. Before getting too aggressive with QoS features, you should make sure you actually need them. If you have a very fast fiber connection, for example, you may not even need to set up your QoS at all. While QoS can help a bit in such ideal scenarios, you’d be splitting milliseconds.

One last thing to consider about QoS setup is that it often leads to lower speeds. Out of the box, routers are most often configured to deliver as much speed as possible, which means first come first serve. When you enable QoS, you may see raw download speeds on your network slow down a bit, although normally not enough to affect usability. Still, if you’re looking for maximum download speeds, your QoS could work against you a bit. For the most part, a measured approach to your QoS is the best path forward, prioritizing only the most important devices.

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