Billion 7800N QoS Tutorial

Quality of Service or QoS is a technology used to help prioritise or limit traffic, usually on corporate networks.  I’ve recently discovered that a child plus Netflix can be hazardous for a gamer.  There is nothing worse than rounding a corner to come head to head with your nemesis in an FPS game to then start lagging as you hear “More Power Rangers!” from the living room and know that your precious ping and internet connection have just taken a nose dive at a very inconvenient moment.

This guide will show you how to configure your Billion 7800N on your home network to enable QoS and demonstrate how it can be used to ensure that the devices that are the most important, always get priority on your internet connection.

Firstly, let’s look at what we are trying to do.

I have a home PC – let’s call it HomePC.  I would like to ensure that this device ALWAYS gets the priority on my network when going out to the Internet.

I have an AppleTV.  I would like to ensure that this device ONLY ever gets the full speed of my internet connection when nothing else is using it.

Everything else, I am happy to leave on defaults.

From a Billion 7800N perspective, there are two methods of controlling your Internet connection – we have PRIORITIZATION, which is what we will be using here and we have LIMITED which is when you only ever want to allow a certain device or application a set percentage of your available bandwidth, regardless of what else is using the network.

In simple terms, PRIORITIZATION means that you can say which of your devices or applications are the most important and if the network is busy, they will take priority or you can LIMIT the amount of bandwidth each device or application is allowed, regardless of what else is using the connection at the time.

In terms of priority, there are three settings on the Billion 7800N.

• High
• Normal
• Low

So to solve my issue and ensure that HomePC is always the boss when it comes to using my internet connection, we are going to set it to HIGH.

We are going to set the AppeTV to LOW  to ensure that it can only use the full Internet connection if nothing else is currently using it.

Everything else that uses the connection that does not appear in this rule set will be automatically granted Normal priority.

The thing to remember with the Billion 7800N QoS Prioritization rules is that you have to configure individual rules for Upload and Download.

Configure the QoS Rule for Home PC

Go to the Billion 7800N admin page and from the Advanced view, click on:

Configuration > QoS

In this example, the IP address for the Home PC is 10.10.10.100

Setup your first rule as follows and then click ADD:

Now configure a second rule as follows and then click ADD:

This has now effectively given HomePC the priority over everything else on your network.

Configure the QoS Rule for AppleTV

Go to the Billion 7800N admin page and from the Advanced view, click on Configuration > QoS

In this example, the IP address for the Apple TV is 10.10.10.200

Setup your first rule as follows and then click ADD:

Now configure a second rule as follows and then click ADD:

 All Done

Once you’re done, the rules should look like this:

This has now effectively given the Apple TV lower priority than everything on your network.

You’re done.  The network is now configured to give HomePC higher priority over everything and the Apple TV lower priority.

This of course assumes that the IP addresses of your devices don’t change – they should either be set statically on each device with DHCP disabled, or by using a DHCP fixed host in the router configuration.

Make sure you click Save Config and then Apply otherwise you might find the next time your router restarts, you’ll have to start again!

I hope you enjoy your new Prioritized network and for me, it means I can now play games in relative safety knowing that the only thing likely to get me killed now is a blatant lack of skill.

If you’d like further information on this topic or have specific questions, please use the comments below.