Switched to streaming tv exclusively how do I make sure the streaming always works w/o interruption

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ng4ever

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We are a family of 4 and sometimes we download windows updates in the background on our PCs, stream a YouTube video, or download a game. How do I make sure this does not effect the streaming tv without interruption or lowering the quality of the stream please ? Of course we all have more than one device so yeah.

We already have a good router. ASUS RT-AC5300 Tri-Band Wireless AC5300 Gigabit Router. This router is good enough right?

Our internet tier we pay for is 50 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload but it is more like 60 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload. Is this enough for 4 people with multiple devices with streaming tv exclusively or do we need to go up a tier ?
 
The short answer, it depends. The long answer, it depends.

Wireless if half duplex, wireless depends heavily upon the client to determine what kind of throughput it offers. Typical streaming only uses around 5mbps, so yes you should be able to run 4 streams without it slowing down in theory... In reality most streams are quite bursty, meaning you don't hold a solid 5mbps but rather it downloads at 20mbps for like 1/4 the time. If you are watching a live stream of some kind, it cannot buffer into the future, so those can be more time sensitive than say watching something on Netflix. YouTube is similar if you watch the playback bar and you'll see if buffers a lot of the video long before it plays.

So my answer back is just try it and see what happens... I doubt anyone can predict what your four family members are going to be doing at a given moment, nor do I know the scope of all of the devices you have on your network or how they will be utilized. You could have 4 people but really only ever have like 2 video streams and a game going, with only one of those streams being wireless. On the other hand you could have everything on wifi, and have power users where every person has a stream going along side some other task, and everything just grinds to a halt. Don't discount the amount of bandwidth facebook can use, because it has lots of media content on it. You might be fine with 3 video stream going, but then if 3 people are surfing facebook over wifi, that might cause everything to go downhill.
 
One of my family members just started watching QVC or HSN live streaming channel on our Roku and it started to buffer while I was downloading at full speed. Yes I do have QOS enabled. Anyway to prevent this from happening ?
 
How many radios does that router have? How many devices can support dual band IF the router is dual band? If all devices are trying to use the same radio, you will have to implement QOS and/or bandwidth limiting and/or times certain activities(game downloads etc) are allowed. 4 devices trying to used the same radio could easily wind up with only a few mbs speed per device due to the way wireless works.

Also, the number of nearby radios can adversely impact your speeds. All those ISP customer use only modem wifi services radio are still using and competing with your router radios for air time.
 
Why don't you just upgrade your ISP plan to 100mb or better yet a 200mb plan. Then you'll have plenty of bandwidth to stream and do all your other stuff.
 
A higher speed wont help if your running out of time slots ie pps(packets per second).
udp pps is more important with streaming.
Make sure your modem is a newer one because they have more processing power to have higher udp pps for the same bandwidth.
Which is why fairly often a 200mb connection will not support more streams than a 100mb or even a 50mb connection sometimes.

Give udp a higher qos priority than tcp-ip if possible in your router will help.
Wire everything you can.
Spread the load and put everything you can that streams on 5.8 and put everything else on 2.4.
2.4 has far fewer time slots(lower pps available) available than 5.8 and is usually more congested.
 
Wireless is a shared medium so only one system can talk at a time. One of the quickest ways to improve wireless performance is to move things to wired (that can be). This frees up more wireless for wireless. The other thing you can do is get another access point so you can distribute the wireless devices, but be sure to hardwire this ap to the existing router or you'll just make even more noise in the airwaves.
 
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