Improve Video and Audio Streaming Network Performance via Quality of Service (QoS) Adjustments

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Hello

If you have the technical knowledge; or know someone who can assist, I highly recommend setting the QoS priority for your network assuming you can access the settings in your router. ISP supplied equipment may not allow this level of customization.

Below is a general explanation of QoS as found on the internet:

If you want in-depth information on QoS click the link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service

Quality of Service (QoS) ensures bandwidth for prioritized tasks and applications.

Adaptive QoS ensures inbound and outbound bandwidth on both wired and wireless connections for prioritized applications and tasks via pre-defined, drag-and-drop presets: gaming, media streaming, VoIP, web surfing and file transferring.
Traditional QoS ensures inbound and outbound bandwidth on both wired and wireless connections for prioritized applications and tasks via manual user-defined parameters.
Bandwidth Limiter lets you set limits on download and upload speeds.

I use Adaptive QoS and Automatic Bandwidth Limiter settings. Below are two slides that show how things appear within my network for QoS using Customization.

The hiearchy can be set by drag and drop in any order you desire as shown in this slide. As you can see Video and Audio Streaming; directly related to Sonos and other devices of a similar type such as AppleTV, receive the highest priority.

I hope you found this information useful! 😊

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M

m-m-i

Enthusiast I

Is this the setting I should toggle on to improve performances you suggest? “optimize for conferencing and gaming”

Yes thats the one. If you want to test if you have an issue this might solve you try the below links – note that these should be run on a wired connection to your main router, not via wifi.

https://speed.cloudflare.com/
https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat

sigh

Prodigy II

Ok, sorry misunderstood, I thought you were talking about enabling FQ-Codel queues on MikroTik routers via command line, which may appear complex to your average Sonos user.

I was talking about those things since that is what I use, and I am responding to the more technical users here who saying QOS is not necessary or overly complicated. The point I am trying (in an admittedly confusing manner) to make is modern libraries like fq_codel and cake are not complicated at all — for an end user config can wrap up to a simple “on/off” switch like you see in the Eero screenshot above — and they work literal magic.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the purpose of fq_codel/cake is to reduce the delays on bottlenecked/saturated links. It’s also why the tests are for maximum data speed. It only enables and starts shaping at a configured point below the maximum link data rate. Until the trigger limit is hit anything can use the bandwidth.

When first discussed and introduced in 2012, in a home environment the internet connection was frequently a severe bottleneck and easily saturated. Things moved on and the Wifi AP became the slowest point, so a wifi optimised version was created. The biggest benefit for Wifi at the time was that it handled airtime better when devices with significantly different maximum speeds were connected.

It has been available in linux for a long time due to it’s high use in routers. Some systemd linux distros also enable it by default. By design it has limited configuration which is sane, but it’s not a silver bullet miracle queuing system.

Typical hardware network buffers are a FiFo (first in first out) and when a link is saturated can backlog, ie bufferbloat, because the time sensitive data is stuck behind other data.

fq-codel & cake, implement queues for flows combined with a traffic shaper for different types types of flow. When below trigger limits anything goes. So regardless of what a client is doing, vpn, video calls, music streaming, game playing it can take as much bandwidth as it needs.

When the link they’re applied to hits the trigger, then the fq_codel and cake kicks in and limits the different traffic flows.

If your use case fits the flow model and you regularly saturate links it can be beneficial and is a reasonable automatic low config control, but its limitations due to being flow based are also documented in the rfcs.

Work VPNs are an obvious case when all traffic goes across the VPN. The vpn is a flow, so there is no control of the traffic within the VPN. Not good when I’m on a video or voice call or ssh’d into remote servers and my VPN gets shaped down.

A high number of flows can make the algorithms ineffective. Bittorrent based traffic can be tricky, eg steam updating, some game updaters, software image downloads (common for linux isos).

In situations like this host IP based shaping can be preferable, or at least understanding what is behind the simple headings/tick boxes.

That eeos setting to prioritise “conferencing and gaming” is bad for my work connection because everything is inside a vpn, so my work video/voice conferencing will actually suffer while my sons gaming will would improve.

If you don’t saturate your links to hit the trigger thresholds or have significant speed differences between wifi devices you are likely to see limited or no benefit.

sigh

Prodigy II

@m-m-i , this is all very interesting, but I am asking myself why so much complexity for a home network, unless its for education/research purposes. Looking at graphs, suggests Starlink network? Is this type of configuration more relevant for a Satellite ISP connection?

If I have sufficient bandwidth to my ISP, why do I need QoS?

...

The point is this works. I work with a colleague who had a 50 down 25 up connection and spent months unable to work at home due to Teams calls dropping, work software lagging… no idea why since our work vpn limits to around 15 dl. I managed to convince her to get an Eero router and all her problems - which she had spent many service calls trying to resolve with her ISP - magically disappeared.

Extrapolate that same experience out to other things she might be doing on her network, like maybe streaming music to multiple Sonos speakers - which these days rely on a pretty constant stream of cloud calls.

How much of that problem was related to the previous router she was using and any newer router would have had the same magical effect?

If the old router wasn’t even hitting the internet bandwidth limits before things collapsed was it hitting hardware limits? Low powered cpus, low memory coupled with poor software can quickly cause issues in a router.

In the past when I’ve used teams, it can fall apart itself long before it gets close to bandwidth limits and latency increases 😂

By all means if a router can let you enable/fiddle with it, there is no harm trying. But it could have unexpected side effects on other traffic or do nothing.

C

craigski

Local Superstar

Based on the above comments, I still standby my recommendation:

If you can afford and its available, I would suggest its better to overprovision your Internet connection, ie fasted speed you can afford, rather than try to analyze control traffic on a congested connection. QoS may be beneficial if you are in a rural location, with limited bandwidth.

AjTrek1Author

While I appreciate that this thread has opened a lot of constructive conversation. However I really think my suggestion has been “ over thunk” ( and the previous was not a typo).

Although I recommend setting the parameters if possible there’s no rule you must do so nor is there a guarantee that you will see an improvement in network performance.

What I can say is that I have none of the issues with Sonos and the new app that is permeating throughout this community like a plague. Does my network perform better because of QoS parameters set or is because I have invested in a very expensive mesh network using three Asus ZenWiFi Pro ET12’s with a wired Ethernet Backhaul? I’ll let you ponder that answer. However, please don’t take it to the Nth degree for analysis

Once again thanks for your comments but I think it’s time to enjoy your Sonos 😊

Together Everyone Achieves More = T.E.A.M.

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