I have double checked and triple checked these MACs to make sure thats not the issue. I also have Ethernet port prioritizing enabled and QoS seems to have no effect regardless of whether another device via LAN or WLAN is hogging bandwidth. If my brother starts playing a YouTube video on his PC my ping in game instantly shoots up from 40 to 150, which makes any game I'm in pretty much unplayable.
Also afaik there is no way to explicitly set bandwidth caps in DD-WRT, at least in the micro build.
Is it because the processor in my router simply can't keep up with the traffic? It has a 300MHz Broadcom chip in it, so it's pretty old lol. If thats the case I'll build a cheap pFsense box.
Its probably got a LOT to do with the sluggish nature of your connection, but either way, the sluggish nature of 802.11G doesnt help. I'd build a cheap pfsense box and get an Ubiquiti Unifi AP, those things are the best APs EVER
You looked at the wrong one. You don't need the UAP pro. And its not a router, its just an AP. You'd still need a router for this. You also have to run the software on a PC to configure it. They are AMAZING little APs though, especially for their price.
Don't be so quick to dismiss a product because of its price. The UAP pro is still a great AP, its $300 because instead of a single 100mbps Ethernet port it has dual gigabit ports for redundancy. That's useful for businesses, just not for a home user. Hence, the normal Unifi AP being what I recommended to you.
Your network would end up looking like this:
DSL modem--->DD-WRT router or pfsense router--->switch--->Unifi AP
I wasn't dismissing it because it was bad, just that it was far out of my price range. I think I'm just going to use an old wireless G card that I had lying around and throw it in a pFsense box with an Intel NIC. I don't really care about wireless speeds and range, the only wireless devices in my house are phones and they only get used for iMessage and Twitter.
Okay. If I were you I'd use pfSense's captive portal option, it allows you to set a per-user bandwidth cap, so that one IP on the network can only use up to (x) mbps of upload and (x) Mbps of download. I have used it before at LAN parties to keep Steam downloads from killing everyone else's connection, it works well, and its easy to get going.
You probably already got pfsense set up by now, but have you tried using the Tomato firmware on the router? Or maybe try a different DD-WRT build? There's been quite a few times that I'll be trying to get a service to work on DD-WRT and just won't unless I try other builds.
I've recently went back to Tomato on my Asus RT-N16 because VLANs were broke on DD-WRT and I've been having really good luck so far. I use the Shibby builds and here's a LINK if you're interested.
If you're in the market for parts, buy an old ITX embedded board from VIA. I've got a 1.24ghz single core one that works great, plus its got hardware cryptographic acceleration so it plays nicer with encryption on my VPN. I'm sure you can find one of them somewhere online for cheap