I have a new respect for the guy that has to decide QoS policies for the enterprise. Not that I didn’t before, but recently I had to start worrying about QoS policies at home.
Allow me to explain. Earlier this year, Time Warner Cable decided it was going to roll out caps on broadband in Austin, much as it had done in Beaumont, Texas. Doing a quick calculation, I estimated that those caps were going to cost me around $300 a month. Since I didn’t have any other broadband providers in the complex I was currently living in, I decided to move back in with my old roommates, in a 4/4 condo. This condo came with free internet – Time Warner’s business class, which was not going to be capped. Even if it was, the condo also had access to AT&T DSL, so we could always switch if Time Warner brought in caps.
The bad news is that the free connection on the Internet was limited to 2mbps down, 256kbps up, and because of the middleware involved by the condo owner, there were frequent connection problems and just plain connection destructive behavior. Uploading to YouTube often resulted in failed file transfers due to the low speeds. Upgrading the connection through the condo was possible, but the prices, based on Time Warner’s business class prices, were exorbitant. The only upside was that each port had it’s own dedicated 2mbps connection, so whatever happened on one person’s computer didn’t affect anyone else.
Time Warner was expected to roll out broadband caps in September. September has come and gone, and it looks like Time Warner has abandoned plans for broadband caps in Austin after the glum response they’ve gotten from the high-tech test markets. (Looks like I didn’t have to move after all, though my roommates are still pretty cool. ) So, with the understanding we’d switch to AT&T or go back to the condo’s broadband if Time Warner ever did roll-out caps, we decided to get TW residential service in the condo – and since there were four of us sharing the connection, we decided to get the highest speed service they offered – 22mbit down, 2mbit up. (The actual speed was closer to 18mbit down, 1.6mbit up, but still impressive.)
Thing is, for the first time, my three roommates and I were on a shared Internet connection. And we’re all geeks of high magnitude. I have a media center PC, desktop for video editing, laptop for travel, and an iPhone, Patrick, Brendon, and Mike all have laptops, and Mike has an Xbox 360.
It actually went pretty smoothly, considering the relative complexity of the network. The Xbox and the Media Center both get wired connections, everything else runs on wireless. Simple enough, and we were up and running within hours.
It wasn’t until the next day when I noticed something strange. I would queue up a whole bunch of downloads on the Media Center PC, and it would saturate the connection. Doing some Web browsing from my computer in my room however, was slow. YouTube videos stuttered. Congestion had reared its ugly head.
But, hey, I thought to myself. I work for a company that deals with this sort of stuff all the time. QoS policies are the solution! And Tomato Firmware had support for QoS policies, so this was a cinch! I’d be ready to go in no time.
Didn’t quite work out that way. Yes, I could set QoS policies, and I made a reasonable guess as to what those policies should be, but I realized, with some dawning sense of irony, that I had no idea what to give high priority, and what to give low priority. I made some guesses, of course, retaining the defaults of giving high priority to the first 512k of packets on Port 80, but lower priority to anything past 512k (likely a file transfer). Then I gave the Media Center low priority, because, by definition, anything done on that box was entertainment, not work or communication. And Skype, Team Fortress 2, World of Warcraft, and the Xbox Live all got the highest priority – all were time sensitive applications. But after that, I drew a blank. Quite simply, I realized I was making guesses. What was the name of that new game that Mike bought? Borderlands or something? What port does that run on? How do I set high priority for Netflix streaming, and only Netflix streaming? What about YouTube? And how much uploading do we do, anyway?
Quite simply, I had no visibility into my network. Tomato Router is great, but it’s not going to give you information like what applications are running on the network, or what sites are drawing the most traffic during what hours. And even though I had power – I didn’t have the knowledge to make the most effective use of it.
I’m sure many in IT management have gone through something similar – ending up with lopsided traffic policies where 10-20 apps ended up in the highest priority class, because they didn’t have a historical analysis of their network to reference.
All the stuff I’ve been preaching over the last three years – they had finally hit me at home. That’s a sobering thought. And this is just one night. We have no way – other than to try to watch a YouTube video in our rooms while downloading off the Media PC – to determine if we see improvement.
I’m going to need to sit my roommates down soon and talk to them about what gets highest priority. This type of discussion really should occur before deployment, but I just didn’t think it through.
At least I can upload YouTube videos now.
This post was compiled with the help of Jesse Najera, Technical Marketing Engineer
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