Prioritising certain types of WAN traffic

I'm moving into my new uni flat soon, and I'll be responsible for sorting out broadband. For better or for worse, we're getting a connection with Sky, so we'll be getting their wireless router provided free.

However, I'm concerned that sharing a connection between 5 people could get a little difficult at times, and I would like to find a way of prioritising VOIP/video calling traffic to ensure that if someone is using http/ftp/torrents the VOIP traffic will make its way through first.

Does anyone have any experience of this?

Will the Sky provided equipment be adequate, or will I probably need to invest in a Draytek router or similar?

I would need wireless g and ADSL2+ compatibility as a minimum.

Any modem, any wifi AP.

I use an Alix box with m0n0wall for traffic shaping and firewalling. It has been running flawlessly for several years. pfSense can also do it, but I was never able to fully get my head around the way it does QoS.

http://linitx.com/product/12346

I am aware of the firewall option, but I was hoping for something a bit more affordable... I know I could technically just build my own cheap box (at least I think so) and stick pfsense and/or monowall on it, but I doubt I'm going to have the space, and buying a dedicated box like that one will be a bit too expensive.

I'd probably just take the risk if it's going to cost that much... I don't think I could pitch something that expensive to a bunch of poor students!

thats the problem with things like skype - no native QoS - suspect even if you do find a device that can do it, it'll be more than a roll-your-own solution.

I'm in the same boat, living in a uni house sharing a connection between four, the O2 Wireless box II (Thomson SpeedTouch TG585v7) that was given to us by O2 is rubbish for heavy use. It resets itself often and there were no QoS settings as I recall, but the ADSL modem part of it was great, high syncs and a stable connection. Similarly I had to sort this out with a small budget, I bought a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH which runs DD-WRT and hooked it up to the O2 Wireless Box which I set to bridge mode. I now have great traffic management options and between the O2 box and Buffalo; they've never crashed or reset since I set this up half a year ago.

There are many routers capable of running operating systems such as DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato to name a few, these will imensely improve a router's capabilities, most notably in your case add good QoS options. Unfortunately routers with built in ADSL modems can't (normally) run these OS'es, you'll have to configure your current ADSL router to run in bridge mode and buy a 'cable router' and install a third party OS.

A good candidate in my opintion is the ASUS RT-N13U for £47 from Scan, this is in the middle ground in terms of features; it has a reasonable amount of RAM and wireless N but no giga LAN.

agreed ddy, i use a asus router, just like that one in fact...could be the same, either way it has a traffic managment built in....i had the same problem but with downloads and gaming...either way set the router to "gaming" an poof! problem solved :)

The DLink router from Virgin has QoS. G/f used to have sky internet. It was fine, but they had 4 people on and it wouldn't always let her watch iplayer. Never got to play with her router so no idea if it had QoS. Have you looked at getting Virgin fibre optic? They have some cheap deals for students atm - always makes it handy having one in the house.

I'm not sure what your budget is but I bought a Billion 7800N and it works very well for this sort of thing and has a 6000 connection NAT table which is handy for lots of torrents.

are we talking incoming or outgoing here?

It would've been primarily outgoing, since the up speed is so limited on ADSL but we've now found out we can get cable, and with 5Mbps upload this isn't such a problem anymore.

Art Vandelay's necro must've thrown this back up to the top.

what a nub :D

Billion 7800N +1
very good router with QOS and is rock solid in performance and uptime
the only downside is the price