I have played around with PFSense a little bit, and watched all of the videos, but I was wondering, if possible, to prioritize my Overwatch traffic over anything else on WAN. I'm on an LTE network connection and whenever someone else on my network loads a Youtube video or even some heavier web pages, it throws my ping through the roof, which pretty much means its unplayable unless no one else is around.
Is this possible and if so what settings/guides should I be looking at? I'm not a total noob when it comes to networking, but I am when it comes to QoS. I don't currently use PFSense (Linksys 54g with DDWRT), but would if it would improve my connection.
Basically you need to configure the traffic shaper with a set of priority queues then apply those queues to different traffic using the firewall. Look for guides for the pfsense traffic shaper and that should help you figure it out, and you will also need to identify the ports used by overwatch in order to put that traffic in the highest priority queue.
I kind of wrote off doing it in DDWRT due to it maybe not having the features I wanted, but that could be an option. I'll give it a try before going to PFSense.
Stupid question, i'm not directly connected to the router, there are two switches in the way. That MAC address setting should still work right?
MAC is tied to specific device, so I think you enable QoS and then go about setting how much bandwidth you want each device to have available. You should be able to just go get a list of connected devices and MAC's from your router information.
I'm by no means an expert here, I just thought of the setting when you mentioned ddwrt and figured I would mention it. The only thing I ever used MAC for in my ddwrt settings was for setting up static DHCP leasing.
So after testing the above settings in DD-WRT, it doesn't seem to have helped. Although I wonder if it has to do with the shared nature of the LTE connection I have. I tested it last night around 2am. Playing Overwatch and watching a Youtube video at the same time had very little impact on the game, however testing at 5pm with the same settings resulted in a ping spike to around 500ms. Might be time to test PFSense out.
Keep in mind that ISP can and do manage their networks entirely different at peak usage hours. Mid afternoon/early evening are terrible times of the day for surfing experience.
My down speed is normally between 230-240mbps, right now @ 5:40pm it's being throttled back a good amount for the plebs. The terrible ping might just be a symptom of using an LTE connection.
No amount of software or hardware or fancy configuration tools can make up for a poor quality of service to begin with.
