Early evening, everyone’s home, and the WiFi that was fine all day suddenly isn’t.
The instinct is to blame broadband. Usually though, it’s not actually the broadband’s fault.
What’s happening is contention. Every device sharing the same WiFi band is competing for airtime.
Without any traffic management, the network has no way of knowing that the video call matters more than the tablet downloading an app update in the background, so everything gets treated the same and everything slows down at once.
QoS, short for Quality of Service, is what changes that. It puts a hierarchy on network traffic so time-sensitive applications get priority when bandwidth is under pressure.
Orbi uses deep packet inspection to identify traffic type automatically. It reads what’s moving across the network – video call, live stream, background sync – and allocates bandwidth accordingly.
You don’t configure it device by device. It learns what needs to move fast and what can wait.
The effect is most obvious in the scenario where you need it most. Someone’s on a call, someone’s gaming, something decides to update, and the call doesn’t break up
#NETGEAR #HomeWiFi #Orbi #WiFiExplained #QoS #MeshWiFi #TechDetail