Medium size business internet sucks, what to do?

[Đỗ Đức Huy]

Well, title is a bit deceiving since it doesn’t really sucks. We get 35-40 MiB/s out of it and it is decent enough for the 30 odd so people typing away doing desk work. But the problem is after hours, we held CSGO tournament with all the people there and we get stutter, lag spike all the time. No drop or loss recorded in game though, just the router box that the ISP gave us craps out under the load (20 clients all sending traffic to 128 ticks servers on a puny freebie internet “box” isn’t fun).

So, the boss gave me a few hundred bucks to make this problem goes away. I was thinking of turning the old ISP box into a optical converter box i.e it takes the network signal and spit out optical signal back to the ISP. The actual routing will be done by an PFsense box. Probably will be an old Dell sff optiplex box with a quad nic card in it. Before I jump the gun and do this, would this help solve my problem? Or would just getting what they call a load balancer be what I need and I don’t need to faff with building a pfsense box?

many thanks.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Caan you get. faster inetnet plan? THatsa probably your best option. Also what is your upload speed? That might be the limit here.

 

A better router/firewall with better queue management would probably help here, but if your fill your connection, queue management own't help at all.

 

5 minutes ago, Đỗ Đức Huy said:

Or would just getting what they call a load balancer be what I need and I don’t need to faff with building a pfsense box?

many thanks.

What would the load balancer be balancing? Do you have multiple isp connections?

 

[Đỗ Đức Huy]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Caan you get. faster inetnet plan? THatsa probably your best option.

 

A better router/firewall with better queue management would probably help here, but if your fill your connection, queue management own't help at all.

 

What would the load balancer be balancing? Do you have multiple isp connections?

 

We have one ISP connection. The problem isn’t bandwidth, since we are on the second fastest internet speed for business here. The problem is that the router can’t handle the load being hammered by 10 client at once needing top quality of service ie low latency and high consistency. We can download GTA V in like half an hour so we can’t call it slow. 35-40MiB/s is like 200-300MB/s you know. A third of the way to gigabit internet. 
So from what you are saying I need that PF sense box huh. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Đỗ Đức Huy said:

We have one ISP connection. The problem isn’t bandwidth, since we are on the second fastest internet speed for business here. The problem is that the router can’t handle the load being hammered by 10 client at once needing top quality of service ie low latency and high consistency. We can download GTA V in like half an hour so we can’t call it slow. 35-40MiB/s is like 200-300MB/s you know. A third of the way to gigabit internet. 
So from what you are saying I need that PF sense box huh. 

Yea if there modem/router sucks, you need your own. 

 

Im kinda a sucker for untangle, but pfsense will work fine here.

 

Also please use bits/s for internet speeds, basically no one uses bytes/s for internet speeds, so its confusing.

 

What are you upload speeds, that might be your limit here.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

2 minutes ago, Đỗ Đức Huy said:

We can download GTA V in like half an hour so we can’t call it slow. 35-40MiB/s is like 200-300MB/s you know. A

No...
40Megabit is 5megabyte. Not the other way around.

[Đỗ Đức Huy]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yea if there modem/router sucks, you need your own. 

 

Im kinda a sucker for untangle, but pfsense will work fine here.

 

Also please use bits/s for internet speeds, basically no one uses bytes/s for internet speeds, so its confusing.

 

What are you upload speeds, that might be your limit here.

We get 250/250 both ways. So most likely the router box then. Poor freebie pos, never knew what hit it. 

 

2 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

No...
40Megabit is 5megabyte. Not the other way around.

We get 250/250 megabit up and dow, or 30 ish megabyte up and down. Sorry, English is not my mother tongue and networking speed is confusing (Thanks ISP for wanting to put bigger number)

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Đỗ Đức Huy said:

We get 250/250 both ways. So most likely the router box then. Poor freebie pos, never knew what hit it. 

 

Probably the router, and thats the easiest to replace and check. 

 

3 minutes ago, Đỗ Đức Huy said:

We get 250/250 megabit up and dow, or 30 ish megabyte up and down. Sorry, English is not my mother tongue and networking speed is confusing (Thanks ISP for wanting to put bigger number)

Everyone uses bits for network speeds, so using bytes is confusing. Bits are used as bits get copied over the line, not bytes, and there are cases where its not 8 bits in a byte.

[Đỗ Đức Huy]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Probably the router, and thats the easiest to replace and check. 

 

Everyone uses bits for network speeds, so using bytes is confusing. Bits are used as bits get copied over the line, not bytes, and there are cases where its not 8 bits in a byte.

Okay. So building a pf sense box it is then. Hopefully this will go over well and not ending up with boss screaming at me.

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, Đỗ Đức Huy said:

Okay. So building a pf sense box it is then. Hopefully this will go over well and not ending up with boss screaming at me.

Id work with your boss here, see what settings are set and needed so you don't break things.

 

Also you really don't want to be using the ISP modem here, there just not great when it comes to management, security, reliability, and ui.

 

Also might not be the isp modem here this is a pretty easy load most cheap routres can do just fine, but its the easiest part to test.