I’ve been fiddling with QoS on my Linksys WRT54GS routers for some time now but I could never get it just right. Now that I know how I thought I’d share it with the world. Setup of QoS really isn’t that difficult; what got me was the lack of information available on the subject.

Please note that the instructions are made with routers running the latest Talisman firmware from Sveasoft (payware). UI may vary from firmware to firmware. You can download the latest Alchemy firmware from Sveasoft for free if you don’t want to pay for Talisman. Only flash your router with a custom firmware if you are relatively confident in what you’re doing; if anything goes wrong you will kill your router off.

First point is only relevant if you’re running a WDS setup with multiple routers interconnected. If you don’t know what WDS is chances are that you aren’t running such a setup. You only need to setup QoS on the router connected directly to the internet. On a related note this is also true for port forwarding and triggering.

Secondly you need to find the actual speed of your internet connection. Often times the actual speed of your connection will be lower than what your ISP claims it is. For QoS to work it needs to know the maximum up-/downstream speed. Naturally if these values are set too high the QoS will think that there’s no congestion on your network which makes QoS a moot point. Now to find you connection speed goto the Speed Tests page at DSLReports and find a site close to you. I had a lot of luck with TPTest from IT– og Telestyrelsen (it’s in Danish, sorry about that).

• Open up the administrative pages on your router and go to the Applications & Gaming tab. From there you go to QoS.
• Make sure that the radio button is set to Enable.
• Port set to WAN
• Input the values you found on the Speedtests pages in “downlink kbps” and “uplink kbps” . For my 2048/512 kbps line I put in 1800 downlink and  400 uplink (a little lower than that I got from the speedtest just to make sure).
• Lastly you need to assign services priorities. I’ve got Skype, HTTP, HTTPS, and Quicktime set to premium and Bittorrent, eDonkey, and FTP set to bulk.

As you can see it’s pretty straightforward to setup QoS but the effect when configured correctly is profound. Having setup QoS I’m now able to have all kinds of downloads running while still being able to surf and watch streaming content unaffected. This feature alone makes the Linksys router worth it’s own weight in gold