QoS (Quality of Service) setup help

[p[ay3r]

Hey guys

I'm pretty new to ADSL (been using 3G the last couple of years... shoot me)
I just got myself an unshaped DSL account and a TP-Link 8840 wired modem. The modem's got a feature called QoS (or Quality of Service) which enables priorities on the modem for "better VOIP and lag-free gaming"

I would just like some advice as to how to set this up for Counter Strike / Steam so that I can see how it works.

I am pretty computer literate, so I should be able to understand most things, just putting it out there..

Thanks guys

[ponder]

I doubt it will make much difference as you have no control over the downstream or what the isp does with your traffic. You will have to look into what TCP or UDP ports Steam/Counterstrike uses in comms with the server.

[Richard7]

I doubt it will make much difference as you have no control over the downstream or what the isp does with your traffic.

True that you can't directly control your downstream traffic, but the QoS will prioritise your upstream traffic which in turn affects your downstream traffic. It works quite nicely for things like VoIP in my experience.

@p[ay3r: Do what ponder says (find out what TCP/UDP ports it uses) and then set those to highest priority in your router's QoS. Some routers don't allow you to specify which ports to prioritise though (they just have QoS on/off, which prioritises common VoIP & gaming ports).

You'll most likely also need to set your maximum upload speed - do a speedtest.net to get your max u/l speed.
Sometimes to get the QoS to work nicely you need to reduce that max speed figure by some margin, eg. 10%. Play around a bit to find the optimum value.

[Pada]

The default port that HL/CS/CSS use is UDP 27015. I'm still playin CS1.6 and our local servers use UDP ports 27015-27020, 28015-28020.

I agree with what richard7 said: QoS alone won't help much if you don't limit the other traffic to a maximum rate (kB/s). You should be able to get a decent latency with the downloads/uploads taking less than 50% of your bandwidth, anything more than that you'll notice an increase in latency.