This site will show you how to stop network lag at home when you share your internet with family, and tenants. The problem with shared internet is that your family may “hog” the Internet by uploading videos to YouTube, torrenting things, and downloading steam games. When they are doing this your internet lags.

You can’t play any online games because your ping would be too high. Your webex and zoom calls suffer terribly in quality. And if you’re a twitch streamer you may have random frame rate drops which is unacceptable for your viewers. Tutorial for twitch streamers with openwrt. You might have gotten used to this and believe it is normal. I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be that way.

This problem you’re experiencing is called bufferbloat.

“Gaming Routers” don’t fix bufferbloat! Don’t get sucked into the marketing and waste your money buying them. If you see “QoS” in router marketing that doesn’t necessarily mean it will stop lag.

What you really need is Smart Queue Management (SQM) such as cake or fq_codel running in your router. It will guarantee low pings in games and clear video-conference calls, even when your shared Internet is overloaded by multiple users.

Cake and fq_codel are lesser known, bleeding edge, wonderful, and free technologies. Below, I’ve listed 9 methods below on how to use them. Each method has a link to their own page on this site.

Since cake and fq_codel are free technologies some of the methods don’t cost a dime if you are willing to flash your current router with compatible open source firmware such as OpenWrt, dd-wrt, gargoyle, and asuswrt-merlin.