I have setup a pretty rockin' home network in the new house but I'm having some bandwidth issues due to the home being 'connected' with all devices and IP cameras running 24/7.

A use case is last month during our 4th of July party I had over 35 devices on my home network through wifi and hard wire.

I have 8 4MP 720p IP cams running 24/7 as well as Amazon FireTV sticks running on 4 TV sets streaming TV, plus an iPad streaming music on Spotify as well as (during that day) at least 5 people who asked for my guest network password using it to supplement their bad service and streaming things for friends to watch.

The external connection from my provider worked just fine and none of the streams themselves cut out (besides one) or experienced buffering/latency - but the internal network totally crapped out at times.

I had symptoms of my IP cams slowing down or completely shutting off due to timing out as well as intermittent connections to the external SlingTV source (mentioned above). I also have an OTA antenna hooked up to a HDHomeRun box to play OTA TV signals on the SmartTV's through the network and that was experiencing issues as well.

All of my devices are connected with Cat5e or Cat6 when possible and 5G wifi when not.

What's the best way to manage high-traffic situations like this? QoS?

Luckily the 16-port switch I'm using is a Netgear JGS series which is managed. My netgear C6300 router also has QoS settings, I believe.

Photo of home rack:

Have you actually identified where the bottleneck is?  Who or what is causing the bandwidth issues?  I doubt its the IP cameras.  
Is one of your guests doing some heavy bit torrent?  How do you know these guests havent shared their password with someone else?




I'd look at your router/network logs to see which device(s) are sucking it up.  I'm assuming your are Gigabit between your router and wired devices?


 

Just so I'm clear.  Your issue is not WAN throughput but LAN throughput?  I find it extremely hard to believe on a Home network.

ETA:  Just to explain what I mean.  The Netgear JGS516 v2 has a switching bandwidth of 32Gbps, and a forwarding rate of 1,488,000 frames/second.  If you're choking your entire internal LAN, then you have to be moving some absolutely insane amounts of traffic.  35-40 devices or not, that's so exceedingly rare in a home network.

Yes, LAN throughput. Well...it's happening

The 4MP 1920 resolution IP cams suck up quite a bit on the network I would think, plus multiple TV's and mobile devices streaming WAN services through the LAN along with an additional HD 1080P stream for the local OTA TV tuner on the network.



No and maybe that's where I need some ideas on how to nail that down?

I haven't investigated the managing software Netgear uses with the JGS series of switches but I think it might have a traffic graph along with the port-specific QoS functionality it provides.

All devices on the wired home network at using non-CCA Cat6 (IP cams) and CCA Cat5e (SmartTV's and entertainment devices).

I know the Netgear C6300 series router/modem has a bunch of nice features and I've browsed most of them but I don't believe it has a traffic log that specifies bandwidth usage on a per-device basis.

LAN throughput between what and what?  If it's your IP Cams and the DVR than it's far more likely you're overloading the DVR and that is bottleneckign the feeds from the cameras.  You need to identify exactly what specifically the bottleneck is.  I say this because 4 HD 1080p MPEG-4 streams at 30fps will only consume 150ish Mbps.

The 16-port switch is handling the wired connections and the C6300 is handling the wifi connections.

The 16-port is connected to the C6300 with a single Cat cable - which come to think of it I do not know if it's Cat5e/Cat6 or just Cat5.

No other wired connections are going to the C6300 at all.

I guess I'm going to need to monitor the network traffic somehow before I make any QoS decisions.

So you had a party, and everyone is on the internet?

Sounds awesome.

 
definitely make sure there isn't a plain old cat5 cable in the mix.  That would cause a slow down in traffic.


 
Seems unlikely unless you reused a bunch of cables you had around a long time.  

LOL my house/area has bad service for Spring/Verizon so people needed wifi to do what people do during an all-day event like text their SO or other friends and use snapchat to show how awesome the party was, etc.



I think it's a pre-made cable that came with one of the devices from my home network setup so I'm not sure what it may be and I literally just thought of that as I was responding above after all this time.

Even if it's a 'Cat5e' - if it's a cheap CCA Cat5e cable it could be reducing performance IIRC.

 
if its not marked on the cable, it might be worth swapping out.


 

I know on my ASUS router, it has a nice monitor built in to show the traffic of each device.  That would be handy to see where all the traffic is coming from.

One problem nobody has thought of is the router connection table. You can have plenty of bandwith but the number of devices and connections outbound are kept track of by the router. It has finite resources to perform connection tracking. That is, it keeps track of what devices have what connections outbound, source device, destination, source and destination ports, and protocols. It has to do this to perform NAT operations. When you start talking about thousands of outbound connections things can start going bad. And many home routers can't handle it. They may only handle 4000 connections before they start to choke. Sounds like alot but it isn't.

Connection tracking for TCP isn't so bad since the connection has a well known session start up and shutdown. And if the session doesn't shut down properly you can time the connection out fairly quickly (several minutes to an hour) without many consequences. If the session shuts down properly it can remove that connection from its connection table immediately - this is the norm.

UDP connections are where issues usually occur. UDP connections don't have startup and shutdown sequences unless its a well known UDP protocol the router can decode. UDP connections are typically used for streaming video and voice services but are used for many more things. When a device "creates" a UDP packet it just fires out data to the destination on the internet. The router, in most cases, won't know whether to expect a reply or not from the destination. And since UDP connections don't have a shutdown sequence the router has no choice but to keep that connection in the connection table for a long time. An hour is standard. When another packet passes through for a connection that timer gets reset back to an hour.

So its possible for a single device to fill the connection table especially if its using UDP and creating many connection table entries in the router.

When the router fills its connection table, which is normally limited by the memory available on the device or the ability of the program tracking them, there are only a few things the device can do. It can refuse new connections, timeout and remove oldest connections to make room for new ones, or randomly remove something from its connection table to make room. But in any event this leads to undesirable behavior.

The solution is to get a beefy router. Mainly look for something with some RAM. Most of your home routers will have something like 16-32MB of RAM. Look for something that has 128MB of RAM or is suited to office use. You can also repurpose an old computer to run monowall or pfsense as a router. It won't take much of a computer to beat the specs on a SOHO router.

Great info.

The router in question, the Netgear C6300, has 128MB of flash and 256MB of RAM available for the router to use and it's touted as a 'gaming' router.

I have a spare mITX system available and I could pop a 2port/4port intel PRO NIC into it to make a pfsense router if needed....but I'm wondering about the benefits of adding a pfsense box to the stack?

I did look up the router and it certainly has speed. The RAM is a funny thing though. In embedded devices, such as routers, the firmware is normally stored compressed in flash and then is decompressed into RAM where it runs. So even with 256MB RAM you could easily have the system OS and filesystem utilizing more than 128MB of RAM. Not saying that is definitely the case here but its a good possibility.

I tried to find what the connection table limit might be but could find no definite answers. But there are certainly people talking about this exact issue with that particular router.

https://www.aussiecable.org/threads/bridging-the-cgd24n-with-netgear-r7000.26/
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2331412

If you want to upgrade look at Ubiquiti routers and switches. You can get enterprise grade equipment at a minimal costs. You have to know what you are doing because they provide support only through user community.

I'm sorry but I have to disagree. Having operated enterprise networks and also having used ubiquiti gear they only pass for low end networking equipment. You'd be better off buying a lowly Cisco ASA 5505 for a gateway. Ubiquiti equipment is buggy and quirky.

I've never even seen any Uniquiti gear so I won't speak to its relative quality but judging from the content and quality of his posts, I don't doubt Foxxz.

I would second the ASA route over SOHO gear.  It's a rock solid device when properly configured and will give the home user a decent (although maybe overkill and a little hard to decipher) toolbox for various network management tasks.

There is a learning curve but it's well worth it if you're going to go through the trouble of racking gear and hosting the number of home devices the OP has.




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I'm not saying Ubiquiti hardware isn't decent for the price point. They get a silver or gold star there. Their equipment has its place. Just don't call it enterprise grade when their Edge routers, until recently, weren't VLAN aware when used as switches.

Unless you have a specific use case for their equipment - I can think of several other alternative I'd choose for a home router for around the same price. A Cisco ASA if you can deal with the learning curve, a computer running linux (my choice due to the amount of control), or a computer running pfSense. Heck, maybe even mikrotik.

Even if I put this Netgear C6300 in dumb modem mode and put a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter after it with a Wireless AP (let's say Ubiquiti again) wouldn't the Netgear still be limiting the network? Or would using the EdgeRouter and having it run DHCP and all routing functions essentially solve it?

If you put the netgear in dumb router mode and its not doing any natting and its just acting as a passthrough then it wouldn't be the limiting factor any more. That would fall to whatever router you put behind it. The ERPoe-5 edgerouter has a default set max of about 262,144 connections (and i think the Edgerouter-X does too). Don't know if it can actually handle that

The ERLite-3 and up have hardware offloading for basic network functions so they can usually handle the amount of traffic. But there are some caveats with that. Certain functions like QoS and traffic analysis disable the hardware offloading and all the traffic goes through the CPU which is significantly slower at processing it (also traffic analysis doesn't work if QoS is enabled). You might be able to push up to a gigabit of traffic through the lower end models with basic natting and firewalling. But only 50mbps if the hardware offloading gets disabled. Theres a list of functions somewhere that can tell you what causes the hardware offloading to get disabled.

The edgerouter-x models don't have hardware offloading at all but they have a faster CPU. So if you need QoS and traffic analysis then they will put traffic faster than the lower end ERLite and ERPoe. The edgrouter X can handle around 200mbps in my testing. It depends on what functions it is performing.

Also.... If security is a major concern.... while the edgerouters are booting all their ports are, by default, placed in switchport mode until the device loads its configuration. Whoops!

How do I know all of this? Because I'm using the gear to bring internet wirelessly to my home (and some of my neighbors) If space, power, and compatibility weren't a factor I wouldn't be using it

And all those caveats and quirks above are just the ones I've encountered
I've also had ones where I can add a bridge interface and then not remove it unless I manually hack it out of the configuration file and reboot the router. Fun stuff like that.

If your network is overloaded, QoS isn't going to make anything perform better.  It will just ensure that some devices get service while others don't when the network is congested.

Changing cables from Cat5 to something else are not going to make any difference unless you have a bad cable that is producing error frames.  Look for error frames at the end stations if you can't check at the switch.

How many wireless devices did you have connected?  This is a weak point in even the best of networks.  If more than 8 or so, get another AP and start distributing devices.  Try to keep your constant streaming stuff (wifi cams if you have any) off the equipment that does your other stuff.  Use separate SSIDs/channels on the APs or separate bands (2.4GHz, 5GHz) to segment them.

The Cisco ASA 5505 is long in the tooth these days, only good to 100Mbps in both directions.  I upgraded to 300Mbps service and had to replace mine to get full throughput.  I use a lightweight pfsense VM, but you can run pfsense on some very small hardware and get stellar throughput.  I've regularly been able to crater most home firewalls with things like legal torrenting of Linux distributions.  They can't handle a good sized state table.

Probably 2/3rds of the ports in my 48-port managed switch have an active device as well. I don't let guests on my wireless, but I've got 8 cams (some wired, some wireless), and a dozen other wireless devices, and I don't have a bandwidth issue at the switch or streaming problems like you are having.  Have you tried using Ethereal or another package to sniff your traffic for things like broadcast storms?

I havent done any snopping on the network, though that's probably my next step to figure out exactly where the issue is.

Funny, I came here to post this. You could be suffering some collisions if everyone of your devices s on a single vlan. I would segregate them out. Ip cameras on one, tics on another, wifi on 3rd. Also, I would get a second wifi or ap as someone recommend above.

V

That's not an option with my current SOHO router, but my ProSafe switch does have VLAN functionality and I could bridge the modem and add a Ubiquiti ER series box to the stack.

Personally, I'm very fond of Mikrotik's RouterOS…and still think it is far superior in features to Ubiquiti's UniFi routing, for a lower price point in many cases. Now start talking about UniFi for wireless and/or IP cameras and I start leaning towards ubnt…but still run Mikrotik routers.

What I would really like to see is the actual CPU load on the Netgear during the bog down. That will help you figure out whether or not there are actual packet collisions occurring, overloading ports, or just not enough CPU for your network demands.

The problem is almost certainly your router.

I can't find the article right now, but I've posted it before.  I think it was anandtech that did a comparison between all the beefiest consumer routers, gaming routers, etc, and a PC running one of the BSDs or something, and the PC blew them all out of the water -- specifically for streaming video.

You have no idea....

So I installed the Netgear ProSafe software a few nights ago and it has nothing in regards to graphing network traffic or hardware loads

I believe there is some rudimentary logging but I'm too lazy for that.

Now you see why those of us who do this for a living buy expensive switches with lots of features that do that sort of stuff.

Well the hardware I have is definately above your average home setup that's for sure. I'm learning as I go.

Is there a recommended 16 or 24-port POE capable switch with good monitoring features?

Cisco 2960X for around $1500, and Netflow from SolarWinds starts at around $1800.

What you could do with what you have now is get a syslog server going, and deploy Cacti with SNMP

Also depends on what you need for POE (48V or some of the non-standard 24V stuff found more commonly in the WISP industry).

I've heard a lot of good things about Netonix's WISP Switch but I haven't had a need to install one yet (again aimed at the WISP industry but is still industrial grade). Which POE protocol it uses can be selected on a per port basis...

This is the GUI view of the router setup I've grown to enjoy (Mikrotik's RouterOS). This particular one is a Mikrotik hAP (not the new AC model) and is used as a simple router at the top of a building for comms infrastructure which is then backhauled over a WISP's network. As you can see, not a ton of ports (if a need arises it will be upgraded to a rack mount model) but for that site it is plenty (only one is actually in use currently). I was running a bandwidth test to clock the CPU up so you could see that displayed in the top right hand corner. Tracks a lot of info for a $40 router...

Of course!

Another vote for mikrotik.

I use them everywhere budget may be an issue.  A bit of a learning curve if coming from cisco or juniper but easy to get the hang of and a fantastic community.  

The Netonix WS-24-400A looks really cool but it may not fit in my racks since they're not gigantic racks...they're wall-mount 12" depth racks.

They have some ears for the desktop switches (which are smaller).

I honestly thing the per port POE configuration is one of the best features about them.

q.  Do your IP cams run multicast and if so do you have IGMP snooping enabled on the switch?

I have a dozen or so Netonix switches on my network, no issues so far!

i wonder if the old switch's backplane couldn't handle switching the bandwidth being used by all the ports, or maybe couldn't handle the number of packets..


i found cables and kits sells refurb cisco gear at decent prices

I looked into that.  It has a 32Gbps back plane, and the spec on the PPS was sufficient.