Posted: 12/9/2014 7:27:26 PM EDT
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I have an annoying bandwidth issue. When streaming video to any of our devices (Roku/Apple TV/tablets/etc) it seems to suck all the bandwidth and none of the other devices connected to the router can access the internet for 10-15 minutes. After that time period, everything works fine and every device connected to the router can stream/access the web/email/etc without issue.
We have a 12MB DSL line (usually tests 9-13 MB on SpeedTest) connected to DSL modem (Siemens SpeedStream 4200). Router is Apple Airport Extreme and I have a ~15' run of Cat5 connecting it to the modem. From there, I have two iMacs connected to the Airport Extreme via Cat5 and everything else connects via Wifi. The Roku boxes are on the 5ghz band and the other devices are on the 2.4ghz band. But regardless of which device starts to stream first (Amazon Prime and Netflix), the others are unable to connect to the internet for 10-15 minutes and then the issue magically clears up. Wifi signal strength is unchanged, but it seems like the router won't allow traffic to pass to the other devices. Are there some settings I could change to fix this issue or do I just live with it as I have for the last year or so? I'm not married to the Airport Extreme, so other router recommendations are fine if that's the issue. Thanks for any advice. |
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A quick search shows that the airport extreme does not have any sort of QoS type service on it.
QoS is what a router uses to distribute bandwidth between shared connections. Still researching... yup, no QoS.. http://store.apple.com/us/question/answers/readonly/does-the-airport-extreme-have-any-qos-features/QHA2KYTJ2XPCAJXKX Now before you say that is from 2010, I read a bunch of reviews from 11, 12,13, and this year saying still no QoS |
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The only thing I can think of is the router has QoS (quality of service) set to allow the streaming stuff to get a big buffer set as priority traffic. Once the streaming stuff gets a good bit of bytes (lol) it allows all traffic on a first.come, first served basis. If it still bothers you, poke around in the settings for qos or priority traffic settings. Might be called smart stream o
or something like that. |