Can I separate a specific amount of bandwidth for gaming?

Question

Hello, I have a problem. I live out in the country and use centurylink 3-4 mbps internet. It’s slow but I can usually play games fine when no one else is using the internet. Yes I am using an Ethernet cable, but the thing is, they might just be using the internet or watching videos. They’d be fine with like 1mbps or less. But instead it redirects everything and either gives all connection to them, leaving me with over 500 ping or sometimes just makes me lag bad. It’s annoying. We all use from the modem. All I want to know is if I can like go into settings and give all bandwidth allocation to my PC, giving them little, seeing and they don’t need it as much or if I can separate internet connections so I get a constant 2 or 3. I tried a router. It’s a decent router, not gaming or anything but I’m not trying to optimize everything, I just wanna be able to play. The router is belkin. I tried Ethernet to that while they used the router, didn’t work. I also tried making them use the router while I connected Ethernet to the modem. Anybody know if I can allocate all bandwidth to my PC when I’m on it?

Answer 1

What you are asking to do is possible. Please understand that Adrian and StevenN are technically correct... I will use this as a "learning moment".



What you want to do is the household equivalent of Net Neutrality being repealed - that is, rather than all data packets being treated the same and fighting for finite bandwidth, you want certain (game) data packets to be given priority so they can get through while the others wait.



A couple of weeks ago with Net Neutrality in effect, all data packets were given the same weight. Gaming, video streaming, VoIP, FTP, email, etc. packets were equal. Net Neutrality was repealed and now, Internet Service Providers can make deals with content providers to establish Quality of Service priorities to treat the data packets differently... No deal? then the packets may be treated differently.



Hypothetical example: CenturyLink is the ISP. It provides the connection to the internet - and could cut a deal with Netflix so the Netflix packets have priority over other traffic. But you don't like Netflix and you do like Hulu. But CenturyLink and Hulu have not cut a deal so Hulu packets don't have priority and they are fighting with all the other data packets out there for bandwidth. You try to use Hulu, but there is lots of buffering and that just gets frustrating to the point you finally end up watching Netflix...

Answer 2

See if your router (Belkin) was QoS, an option where you can select priority for traffic. Without QoS, not much you can do unless you put in a high end, commercial firewall/router

Answer 3

While in most cases, companies like CenturyLink will not let you make any modifications to their equipment, many people choose to attach their own wired or wireless router to that equipment and establish an internal network instead. Some of these routers have controls on them that allow you to throttle or restrict access based on TCP/UDP port numbers. So if you are playing Battlefield 4 on Port 3659, and you don't want someone downloading files via FTP (port 21) at the same time, you can turn on a restriction, or dedicate specific bandwidth amounts for specific ports, or even for specific network devices.



Attached is an example of Bandwidth Control that is available on a TP-Link network device. You can see if you have access to something similar on your equipment.