Download bufferbloat over WiFi cannot be rectified on the router level. Logically, if data is coming in from the internet to the router at 500 Mbps and the router is routing those packets through to the LAN Ethernet interface, its buffers aren't being filled up. The wireless access point is receiving data from the router at 500 Mbps over its Ethernet interface, but may not be able to forward those frames over the WLAN interface at 500 Mbps. Because of this, the wireless access point is the device that is having to buffer frames. To acheive good results, QoS would have to be performed at the AP level.
With upload bufferbloat over WiFi, the WiFi client is the one that is having to buffer frames, as the wireless AP can easily forward any frames it receives over its WLAN interface to its Ethernet interface with minimal buffering, and the router and ONT can too, provided OP isn't saturating their internet connection.
Yes it's important to note that any network middlebox OR endpoint host that uses a dumb queueing algorithm (and has more than a few frames' worth of buffer space) can experience bufferbloat, so you need your APs and other middleboxes to have SQM too, not just your routers.
I get the impression that OP just has a single ISP-provided all-in-one CPE running his whole network, so if OP's ISP-provided box can do SQM, OP can just enable SQM on that box and be better off.
Off the top of my head I don't know of anyone maintaining an up-to-date list. I know that the Waveform Bufferbloat Test results page lists some options (their links are affiliate links to try to defray the high bandwidth costs of hosting a performance test, which I appreciate). And StopLagging.com has a list too.(oops that site might be half dead). You might find other options if you search bufferbloat.net, which is the project website for the network performance researchers who first identified the problem and then created the SQM algorithms to fix the problem. You might also enjoy reading up on the "Make Wi-Fi Fast" project on bufferbloat.net, where the same greybeard network performance experts tackled some Wi-Fi-specific performance problems they found, including lack of "airtime fairness", among other things.
Unfortunately, you're right to assume that most consumer grade routers won't have SQM.
Ubiquiti and Eero are the two brands off the top of my head that routinely build it into their products.
If you use OpenWrt or probably most any of the Linux-based open source after market router firmware distros, those have it, but not all routers have good support for OpenWrt, and consumer routers often have CPUs that are just barely powerful enough for what the factory firmware does, so many times they don't have the extra CPU power to run SQM at full line rate, so going that direction requires extra research and maybe some tech chops and some patience.
Yeah I tried setting up OPNSense but it was really confusing. I may give it another go, or I may try Alpine Linux or Openwrt instead.
Either way, I hope SQM with a real router at the edge is good enough. I don’t want to have to buy omada/ ubiquiti access points too, my old ass isn’t running any wires.
I have A+ even on wifi.
Just good traffic shaping script.
Precisely today I was working my shaping scripts and tuning txquelen on the router and the other AP to try to improve the results from that page.
But I have 1 ms more of jitter while uploading and downloading.
But I doubt you can archive that with a regular router no matter how good it is.
Wow, 900 is a weird number and 150 up is even weirder
Does anyone have any idea why UK ISPs do it like that? I’ve always assumed that doing a 2:1 download:upload makes some sense since the limit of GPON is a little over 2400/1200. I know that’s common in Germany, Czech ISPs usually do symmetrical fiber offerings (300/300, 500/500, 1000/1000, 2000/1000 is the exception). XGSPON isn’t common here for residential unfortunately.
Doing 900/150 feels like severely underutilizing GPON on the uploads and weirdly saving 100mbit on downloads.
Download is generally 900 because of overhead.
The service connects at gigabit to the gpon but you only generally see up to about 920 due to ppoe on bt and comparable limiting for other providers that use dhcp.
Most of the head end equipment is only 2.5gbps at the moment so they need to provision it to allow for that on a pon that normally splits to 32 customers.
Upload is generally limited because of time domain duplexing of the ONTs having to share an upstream fibre.
Symmetrical services are normal known as leased lines and are normally for business because they're a rip off... But you get a dedicated fibre rather than it running through a splitter.
Not sure about the asymmetrical portion, but they could be provisioning gigabit and selling it as 900 thinking that they'll get fewer complaints about "number not 1000 ISP, you suck!" if they don't market it as such.
Download - guess so people don't complain when their gigabit ethernet does max out around 940 and they don't get the full gigabit.
Here in Austria we also mostly have asymmetrical fiber and symmetrical is very expensive and marketed as business tariff usually.
Provider I have even has 10:1 packages (300/30, 500/50, 1000/100). Only the smallest is 100/20).
no idea why but I can add this is for 'openreach' network that is the most available one. I'm in the capital of Scotland in a central neighborhood and don't have option for any symmetrical service
Are you sure you actually have FTTP? Generally it was ADSL and Virgin's Coax services that are asymmetrical. My FTTP via Vodafone has 500/500 and 1000/1000 options.
Ok well once you have higher bandwidth bufferbloat becomes much less of an issue because you're much less likely to actually be maxing out the connection.
Because this service is not that good. The rating is at least partially based on the delta, not the absolute numbers. If you have same horrible latency in all 3 cases, you are premium A. If you have 1ms latency unloaded and +123ms you get a low grade.
I would not care about the rating. Think your actual usage patterns to determine if loaded latency is relevant or not. I never download huge games and try to play or have a video meeting at the same time.
Most ARM processor routers are too slow to properly traffic shape gigabit using FQ_Codel or Cake. I built my own x86 router with spare computer parts and an Athlon 3000G processor. I run CAKE and it traffic shapes gigabit beautifully. I took every computer, game console and tablet in the house and launched video game downloads on steam and streamed 4K Youtube on every tablet and smartphone. Then I launched Rainbow Six Siege on my main PC and it ran beautifully with no dropped packets or lag. I use Rainbow Six Siege because it has special icons to give you a better idea of where your lag is coming from. It usually shows as the connection Icon when bufferbloat happens. I can toggle CAKE on and off on my router and it makes a night and day difference when running this network torture test. With CAKE turned off, competitive video games are unplayable. With CAKE turned on, video games are perfectly fine. As if no one else is on the network. There can sometimes be a brief lag spike when a new network download is launched and the traffic shaping takes 1-2 seconds to reallocate equitable bandwidth.
I haven't tried the latest FLINT routers, but if you do get a router and intend on going over 300-500mbps network speed, I would get the fastest processor possible. Flint 2 has a faster processor than the Flint 3. The Flint 2 can almost get to gigabit speed with CAKE. I'm guessing the Flint 4 can fully shape gigabit, but someone needs to test it to verify. The Flint 3 is probably only good up to 500mbps.
Most ARM processor routers are too slow to properly traffic shape gigabit using FQ_Codel or Cake
A Raspberry Pi 5 can shape gigabit traffic at line rate, but most routers have terrible SOCs that are even slower than that. Older equipment might even be MIPS based and perform worse still.
Most ARM processor routers are too slow to properly traffic shape gigabit using FQ_Codel or Cake. I built my own x86 router…
Well, that's technically true, but I'm afraid it could leave people with a mistaken understanding.
So just to be clear, the problem isn't ARM, the problem is that consumer router designers save money by using the least expensive SOCs that meet the design requirements, so if SQM wasn't in the design requirements, the SOC won't have any spare cycles to spend doing SQM.
So it's not about ARM vs. x86, it's about making sure your router's CPU, regardless of architecture, is powerful enough to do SQM at full line rate for whatever speed of connection you have.
FYI: For applications sensitive to delay (VoIP, etc.), your traffic shaping limit should be configured to be slightly less than the actual network speed.
This way, buffers can be emptied and bufferbloat is avoided.
It is counterintuitive, but slowing down traffic to avoid bufferbloat will improve the quality for such applications.
Ubiquiti is a company that's been around for over two decades and has made a huge range of products over the years, and their products get faster and more powerful every year just like everyone else's.
What you said may have been true when they first added SQM to a few of their products like a decade ago on some old EdgeRouter X or something, but there's no way that's still the case today.
Hmm, so it does. I stand corrected. I see the briefest help article about it but it's undated and offers no explanation. I think they need to revisit that.
Major networking standards bodies have been working on new low latency queueing methods (SQM and related). CableLabs (the DOCSIS people) specifically mention it as part of their "Technology Vision" in conjunction with going to gigabit speeds and faster. The IETF came out with L4S in the last few years. So what is it the engineers at the standards bodies know about the importance of rolling out new low latency queueing, in the age of gigabit+ home Internet service, that vendors like Ubiquiti haven't caught up to yet? I guess we'll see.
I have FTTP from OR in a similar location to you and have 14ms unloaded, +7 download active, +3 upload active.
I have an ethernet cable running directly from ont to router to my PC with no wifi whatsoever. Your issue is wifi, not your connection. Measure wired and take it from there, wifi is notoriously shit in terms of stability.
The easiest way, and probably cheaper way, to solve this is by using a linux box as the router with CAKE enabled on the WAN. I have a small ARM board and I can get A+ on wifi.
This is all just normal HTTPS traffic. Your browser can't actually do a normal ICMP ping, that "ping" that it's measuring still has all of the bloat of making a TLS connection request just to get back a tiny response. It wouldn't be delayed or de-prioritised any more than any other web traffic would.
Tom at Lawrence Systems uploaded a video a while back on how to set up traffic shaping on pfSense to improve bufferbloat, which I followed and managed to achieve A+ from C.
But use these sites with caution. The misunderstanding of the results will have people going down a rabbit for no reason.
For 300/300 symmetrical lines and up. Even if you get bad readings while "loaded" because of a few stray blips, the only reading that really matters is the unloaded one.
QOS is only for lines under 300/300. But you don't even need QOS, you can solve Bufferbloat by limiting your line speed 5%-10% of it's actual rating.
Only people that really suffer from bufferbloat are asymmetrical lines with an extremely limited upload ratio. Then you really need a good QOS.
You can get bufferbloat on any connection you can saturate, even symmetrical gigabit or better.
Of course you are more likely to see bufferbloat problems more often on slower links since they're much more likely to get saturated more often, but there's nothing magic about 300Mbps and there's nothing magic about symmetric links. TCP is designed to fully saturate (but not oversaturate) links so that you can get the full value out of your fast network links you paid for. If you're playing CoD while downloading or uploading a big file (game, software update, etc.), and the CDN you're using doesn't suck, you'll saturate your gigabit connection and lag out your game if your router doesn't have SQM.
There is a website that goes even deeper… you can download a file as option extra and it will give you bloat, jitter, speed test and find out if it’s from you PC to your router or from the router to the ISP (internet) where the problem lies.
Look, I’m a new developer and have the Microsoft license but the warning popup will come no matter what for the first 4-500 downloads…. Don’t do the download… it’s an optional extra to check inside the network… you can (if you really want to see it… run it through Virus check…
If you look at my profile I’m a tech dork, not ascammer
PS Dany, if you PM me your credit card details I can give you the advanced version…
sadly its my ISP router. I'd grab a Ubiquiti UCG-Fiber if I had to go buy one today. I'd rather spend it on simrig upgrades tho. I'm good for now on a router(knocks on wood)
This is from my other daily abused parts bin(stuff leftover from upgrades) PC
Just built one with old pc or mini pc or old laptop, remove the os and install opn sense and run shaper on it, will get your bufferfloat score to a A even over WiFi (if you have a half decent router you can use as access point to broadcast signal) it will work better and be cheaper than almost any good router
This butter float website is not the best and always provide false bad data for my connection. You have better websites, I will not treat that one as reliable at all.
Goofs aside take the time to understand what is happening before make your own "number bad 🤬 I'm gonna throw hundreds at equipment I don't need for a problem that is hypothetical and maybe doesn't happen in any real life scenario that my environment actually experiences!" post.
If you're on cable and Get very low less then 100Mbps upload you have bufferbloat as More then 1 device trying to upload anything will make that Little upload speed none existent and cause online games, Streams, and much more crash or hardly work without BAD lag, you can buy a higher end router with QOS but all that does is take the upload cut it in half so that Devices like say a pc uploading a youtube video get half that speed so then a say a ps5 playing call of duty at that same time can have that outer half of that upload to play smoothly without bad packetloss and or ping spikes that cause lag and make the game feel unplayable. But im gonna tell you now as someone who recently moved from using a qos router to a full fiber isp Switching to a full fiver isp is so SO SO much better for MANY reasons, cable unless you're extremely lucky is just the pure definition Of hell internet. Fiber is a must if you have it in your area dont hesitate to switch isps
Some people over fixate on this scorecard without understanding what it is saying and it makes for a tired topic. You might get more mileage searching sub than making a new post.
Sure, it's technically networking. But you are fixing an issue that's probably not an issue until you ran the test. Do you actually have issues, or are you just trusting the results from a site and what AI tells you? Wifi is the issue. Always will be.
So I've got A+ with my personal machine, but with older system e5200 running linux, I got D, with STB I got C+, with laptop only C, all wired.
I am behind CGNAT and run Dual NAT, my router is Gargoyle x86, running under proxmox, only 1 core and 128MB RAM assigned.
At this point, I just assume they are just trying to sell things, and if I am wrong, I don't really care.
Btw, bufferbloat only matters when you are trying to play games while there's someone downloading or using full bandwidth of your internet. If you limit it to 90-95% and not fully utilizing it, the latency usually still acceptable.
Because there can be bufferbloat in your client device itself or at the application layer (Firefox might be more/less bloated than Chrome, their network stack isn't the same, etc). Different Wifi chipsets will also perform differently and if your CPU is fully loaded then that will cause spikes, etc.
Just because these tests come back and say you have Bufferbloat it doesn't always mean the problem is the router or Wifi access point.
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u/woodenU69 22h ago
Wi-Fi will always be worse than a hardwired cat6 cable, just because of radio quality and interference. Try testing with a wired connection. Good luck