Gaming/Netflix/QoS: Is the 8900 what I need?

Discussions for BiPAC 8900 series: 8900AX-1600, 8900AX-2400, 8900X
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disposalist
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Nov 28, 2019 3:07 pm

Gaming/Netflix/QoS: Is the 8900 what I need?

Post by disposalist »

Hello, knowledgeable Billion folks! Please excuse a plea for knowledge as a 'hello' post. Thank you in advance for anyone patient enough to read my extensive post and help me out.

I'm a gamer and a watcher of Netflix. I'm an work-from-home developer also. I use Plusnet and have FTTC that, after many years of badgering Openreach, is pretty much problem free at 80 down and 20 up (well, 70 and 16 in reality). I cat6 hardwire everything.

As a watcher of Netflix I need a big-ish pipe, though I don't do 4K.

As a gamer (Battlefield, for example) I need low ping and as little latency variation as possible.

My only issue, really, is a get latency variation sometimes for no apparent reason and I get latency variation always if the missus is watching Netflix (or just streaming music using Spotify and Chromecast even).

I have only ever come close to 'solving' this using an Edgerouter ER-X in which you can specify an Up/Down general maximum that is within your max sync speed. I'm no technical expert, but it appears this 'free overhead' lets the system breathe more easily.

With the ER-X, my bufferbloat is down from 125ms to 30ish. This seems to eradicate the random infrequent latency variation, but the activity 'pulses' caused by Netflix (presumably squirt buffering) every few seconds are only reduced, not eliminated, so watching Netflix while gaming is still a problem.

Further QoS setting on the ER-X seemed very complicated and I got nowhere with it. Also, the whole separate modem, router and wi-fi access point setup was a pain.

With all that preamble in mind, here are my questions: -

1) I see, from the manual online, that the QoS on the Billion Bipac 8900AX-2400 allows setting of the up/down bandwidth. Does this mean, as the ER-X seemed to allow, I can set this to be a percentage less than my actual sync speed to give me an overhead to stop the down/up pipe ever getting totally swamped and improve bufferbloat for all applications?

2) It's not entirely clear from the manual the extent of the 'by application' QoS. Could I tell it to never allow Netflix to swamp the system and to prioritise gaming packets in some way? Or would I (could I) allocate a maximum bandwidth to everything but my gaming PC in order to set the priority?

I've abused Amazon by ordering several different routers over the last year or so including very expensive 'gaming' units and it seems none with a built in modem even allow download 'shaping' and their built-in gaming QoS does nothing for the situations I highlight above.

As I say, the very cheap and capable ER-X is the only one that has come close. It's very frustrating. My situation must be shared by a *lot* of people out there. Is what I want just not possible?
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