While busy with an important meeting on Zoom, suddenly your network goes for a toss and the internet gets patchy. It can happen to anyone, anytime. This is because the upsurge of smart devices at home and increased multimedia applications often plague our Wi-Fi routers. Called ‘Bufferbloat’, it can slow down home networks and cause jitters in online video calls and games, even with a high-speed fibre network.
The root cause
The Wi-Fi router assigns a local IP address to each connected device, allowing the router to send information from the internet to the right device. Compare this to a courier delivery service. Because each house has an address, it becomes easier for the delivery agent to hand over a package. With an increase in the number of deliveries in one particular area, the company decides to send multiple packages together to save transportation costs. While this is optimal for the company, it means that some packages are held up at a hub instead of being delivered instantly. The courier company waits to get multiple packages for an area before they can send them out collectively. Something similar happens in a Wi-Fi router, which hoards certain packets of data in ‘buffers’ so they can be sent to a device more efficiently, but not instantly. Bufferbloat occurs when a broadband or Wi-Fi network gets congested with a large number of buffers intended for multiple devices. This results in a laggard performance even with
a high-speed internet connection.
Issues arising out of it
With multiple phones, tablets, computers and other smart devices in our homes, a massive amount of data must be transferred from the router simultaneously. For instance, there are two people in the house, one is watching YouTube videos while the other is playing an online game or attending an online video meeting. For the latter to experience the game or the online call without any lag, the router must break down the information into smaller packets and send them more frequently.
Most Wi-Fi routers cannot differentiate between the data requirements of an online game and a video and add their buffers to the same stream. This lack of priority can lead to poor performance during online meetings and games.
Identify and fix
You can detect bufferbloat on your network using free online tools. Go to dslreports.com, click ‘Speed Test’, and then ‘Run Test’. Choose the type of connection between DSL, Fibre, or Satellite, and the tool gives you a letter grade based on the amount of bufferbloat in your network (with A+ being the best rating, implying the least lag).
To fix bufferbloat, you must buy a Wi-Fi router that supports AQM or Active Queue Management, also known as Smart Queue Management. It is recommended for people who run applications that require low latency/minimal lag. Besides gaming and online meetings, it is useful for low-latency trading (market activities that rely on milliseconds of change), IT risk management, real-time security, running private servers, and more recently, AR and VR. With AQM, smaller packets can move through the router faster, resulting in better performance in online gaming or video calling.
Unfortunately, routers with AQM do not come cheap, and you may have to spend upwards of `25,000 to get specialised gaming routers, such as Netgear Nighthawk Pro XR1000, to get AQM pre-loaded. There is, however, a much cheaper solution for anyone ready to get their hands dirty with some tinkering: enabling AQM on routers by tweaking their firmware. You can visit OpenWrt at openwrt.org and find a list of countless affordable routers, including the TP-Link Archer C50, which support open-source firmware. Every router has a back-end interface that can be accessed by connecting the router to a PC using LAN/WAN and entering a specific IP address in a web browser’s address bar.
Most interfaces have an ‘update firmware’ option. After downloading the firmware file (usually in .bin format) from a repository like OpenWrt, it can be chosen through the Update Firmware option and installed. Before attempting to instal the firmware on your router, verify it is not provided, leased, or
sold by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). ISP-provided routers may have built-in software restrictions preventing the successful installation of new firmware. Furthermore, customising ISP-provided routers may lead to a voided warranty.
Additionally, installing new firmware often resets a router to its factory default. So, you will need to set up your router again. For a seamless reconfiguration experience, ensure you have a basic understanding of your router’s settings and are comfortable managing them. You may also want to document your current settings or create a backup before installing the new firmware to reference later during
the reconfiguration process.