UPC routers are CRAP !!
I've being with UPC now for a little over 3 months. First signed up for their 25MB fibre package and later upgraded to their 100MB fibre package.
Yes the connection is very fast, what you'd expect from a 100 MB download speed connection BUT...
...here comes the downside to UPC
Their routers are useless unless you plan to only have one person use the internet at any one time in the house. Let me explain why...
The routers you receive from UPC (I've gone through 3 and have their most recent one now) have no QoS feature (Quality Of Service) or the most recent one only has the QoS feature for the ""Wireless"" connections to it.
The QoS feature is something that is built into the router that acts like a traffic cop at an intersection where the traffic lights have stopped working, the traffic cop gives each lane of traffic it's fair share of the road during busy times, With UPC routers it's more a case of that movie Mad Max, bandit country! No rules!
So lets say John is upstairs on his computer, John is quite an annoying tenant who is sub-renting one of the rooms in your house. His computer is connected directly to the UPC router via Ethernet cable and John sure loves to use a lot of Torrent websites downloading large files and making sure that the 100 MB line gets its intended usage.
Now onto Myself, My computer which is downstairs and also happens to be connected to the router directly via Ethernet cable. I come into my room, sit down in front of my computer and proceed to load the Google search page. It does not load, no network connection or it loads a blank white page.
Why..? Because John upstairs is consuming all available bandwidth on the internet connection and until whatever it is he is doing has finished my computer will have to sit in the queue and wait until whatever it is he is downloading has finished. No QoS feature, no traffic cop !!!
So I watch the router closely which happens to be directly beside my computer, I'm on port 1 and he is on port 2...I watch his LED light on connection 2 blink constantly in the hope it will soon slow down and stop suggesting whatever he was downloading has finished so I can finally start to use the Internet too, after all I'm paying 50% of the costs as well as him.
It does not slow down, out of anger I feel like plugging his Ethernet cable out, but don't want to cause an argument so all I do is drop hints while in the kitchen together that the connection was crap, that there is no QoS feature and when he is doing something with the internet that I can't etc.. etc...
I can't shout upstairs to him to stop what he is doing, it's not entirely his fault, it's the UPC routers lacking features to prevent this exact situation from occurring that's the problem here. I want a router with a QoS feature that cuts each computers bandwidth in half to allow each computer connected to the router their fair share. Now this is not possible with UPC routers, I've being on the phone to them non stop about this issue that's why I went through 3 routers with them, they always try to claim it's a line fault or router fault unless you keep on them and they finally acknowledged that their routers suck and don't have that feature but not in those words.
Now I've being doing a little research, I think a solution is to purchase another router that has QoS fully supported where I can assign speeds to certain MAC addresses in the router. The problem is I'm not sure which router I need to buy in order to achieve this.
To simply put it, you plug your new router into the UPC router and have your new router manage all the Ethernet cables and whatever wireless connections that happens to use the connection also. Drop the firewall and all other security features on the UPC router and place your new routers IP address into the DMZ.
My question to you all, which new router is best to purchase in order to achieve this goal?
Many thanks
