Setting priorities to different data streams in a wireless network?

Factual Questions
1

Sometimes, if one person on my home network is streaming video, it will cause what I’m doing on another computer on the network to lag.

Is there a way for me to make the network prioritize the thing I’m doing, so that if anyone has to lag, it will be that other person’s streaming rather than the much more important and vital business I am trying to take care of (namely winning a game)?

2

You might be able to configure this on your router. My Linksys router has a bandwidth limiting feature but I’ve never had to use it. There’s also software that can limit bandwidth which you can install on the computer of interest.

3

You can do it with Tomato. E.g. http://www.polarcloud.com/img/ssqosc108.png
http://www.polarcloud.com/img/ssqosg108.png

4

It’s called “Quality of Service”, but it’s not easy to set up. You basically have to know what the traffic on your network looks like (in terms of destinations and/or ports) and configure the router to let web traffic trough at max priority (unless it’s a big download, in which case you want to de-prioritize it), streaming video lower than that, BitTorrent lower than that, etc. Here’s one forum thread with an example setup of Tomato-based QoS for gaming.

Tomato is custom firmware and can do this, but it only supports a limited number of routers. There are also some routers that ship these days with this feature built-in (usually for gamers). I don’t know the specifics offhand, but maybe this’ll at least you give a place to start Googling…

5

Also, if you’re going to look for a gaming router, be sure it explicitly mentions QoS, traffic shaping, or something similar… otherwise it could just be a regular router sold to clueless Xbox gamers.

(In other words, “gaming router” can be a generic marketing term OR it could mean a router with special QoS capabilities. The latter is what you want.)

ETA: If you can afford it, it’s easiest just to get your own, separate internet connection. Back in my gaming days, I learned the hard way that this was far easier than constantly dealing with router headaches, port forwarding, complaints that I’m hogging all the bandwidth, blah blah blah.