johnnytran

Ten years ago today, we launched Netduma.
When you’re in a startup, you spend most of your time looking forward. Rarely, if ever, do you look back. Learn from your mistakes, don’t dwell on them, keep improving.
But today, we want to pause for a moment. It has been a decade, after all.
The Beginning
We launched Netduma from Iain’s parents' kitchen. Our website had just gone live, selling the Netduma R1—our first router. It was no wallflower. Frankly, it looked a bit like a fire alarm, only had 2.4GHz WiFi, but the software Iain had built was unlike anything else out there.
We sold out of those first R1s almost instantly. The e-commerce site Iain’s dad had hurriedly put together held up well. Our logistics process? Not so much. That led to many all-nighters as we worked through the order backlog.
When you’re a startup, it’s impossible to be good at everything. But to make it, you need to be exceptional at one or two things. We had two. As gamers, we knew firsthand how much lag sucks. And with Iain’s brain, we could actually do something about it.
Soon after, we moved into our first office (to the relief of Iain’s parents, whose house had begun to resemble a factory floor). We hired our first full-time employees. Word spread about what our software could do.
Bit by bit, month by month, we levelled up. We improved our software. We grew our team. We made mistakes. We learned from them. We kept going. And we repeated that over and over.
The very first Netduma office.
Looking Ahead
Fast forward to today. Our tech stack has evolved from fixing lag in games to fixing all bad Internet - for work calls, video streaming, and everything else. We’re partnered with British Telecom, Telstra, NETGEAR, Nokia, Genexis, and Mercku, with more partnerships to announce next year. Just a few weeks ago, our Service Provider business won the Scale-Up of Network X award.
We’ve got a great team, great customers, and great support around us. And we’ve managed to do all this without any investment, putting every penny we made back into R&D to make new features (more on that further down).
If you’re reading this, you’ve likely been part of the journey. Whether it was buying one (or all!) of our routers, helping on the forum, or telling us how we could improve - you’ve made a difference. Every piece of feedback, the good and the bad, has helped shape who we are today.
None of this would have been possible without the support we’ve had along the way.
Thank you.
But here’s the exciting part: we’re just getting started.
For the past few years, we’ve been working on two groundbreaking features. When we first envisioned them, we weren’t sure they’d even be possible. One fixes bufferbloat once and for all, with no downsides. The other pinpoints the root causes of poor Internet performance, whenever they occur. These features are set to shake up the industry and will be announced early next year.
While it’s great to look back on the past ten years, we’re even more excited about what’s ahead. A huge thank you to our elite team in Cambridge, our incredible partners, and everyone who has supported us along the way.
Thank you,
Luke, Iain, and the entire Netduma Team
P.S. If you haven’t yet bought our award-winning Netduma R3 router, which runs the very latest Netduma software, you can use the code ‘10Years’ for 10% off—this week only.

Yep connection's are one sided, coming from a career 3kd player every cod i don't even want to look at my kd in this. It's very rare i win a face to face gun fight with someone even though i shoot first. Huuuuge desync between what i see and the other player's experience, i don't know why i am always on the bad side year after year until half way through its lifecycle where i can salvage my kd when the connection finally improves 😄
I've tried a bunch of different routers, nothing helps. It's almost as if the experience is tied to my account

He's helped people that don't know a thing about the internet. All he'd do is forward ports and set up the QoS, basic configurations anyone with a brain can do themselves 

Yep connection's are one sided, coming from a career 3kd player every cod i don't even want to look at my kd in this. It's very rare i win a face to face gun fight with someone even though i shoot first. Huuuuge desync between what i see and the other player's experience, i don't know why i am always on the bad side year after year until half way through its lifecycle where i can salvage my kd when the connection finally improves 😄
I've tried a bunch of different routers, nothing helps. It's almost as if the experience is tied to my account

If your router has a firewall you can just block foreign IPs, takes a while to pull them/manually block ranges but in the end you have your own homemade geo filter 😄

Yep connection's are one sided, coming from a career 3kd player every cod i don't even want to look at my kd in this. It's very rare i win a face to face gun fight with someone even though i shoot first. Huuuuge desync between what i see and the other player's experience, i don't know why i am always on the bad side year after year until half way through its lifecycle where i can salvage my kd when the connection finally improves 😄
I've tried a bunch of different routers, nothing helps. It's almost as if the experience is tied to my account

He's helped people that don't know a thing about the internet. All he'd do is forward ports and set up the QoS, basic configurations anyone with a brain can do themselves 

Hopefully we get the old prioritisation back - not a fan of smart qos tbh (I haven't had a good experience overall on MWIII with it). At the moment I've gone back to the R2 with UDP prioritised and the games have improved (and my ping's low and stable).
Without knowing how smart QoS works (is it Game/Voice, Normal, Video on the R2? are DSCP marks applied to WAN (Advance setting on R2?)), I feel like these give different experiences so it's good to have this option. You'd want to have control whether DSCP is applied to WAN (some ISPs might not like it and down prioritise your packets) and you don't want your QoS to be tuned for Wifi when you're playing hardwired (I think we were told to select Game/Voice on the R2 when playing via wifi, Normal for hardwired). I have a feeling smart qos might have gone the Game/Voice route as I saw WMM mentioned in the stats for nerds page. I this is the case it's unfortunate cause it gave me the worst experience with the R2. My best experience on the netduma was on the older firmware, before they introduced Game/Voice, Video etc.

Yes, what I said won't apply to you with your closest server being 1000km+ away.. It applies to others in Europe (mainly west side) that have multiple server locations close by to connect to. There are people here from the UK that have a crap experience playing single digit ping on their local servers but have better experience getting 30ms+ on Spain for example.
I can't take advantage of this unless I move states 😄, I live in the same state as the servers in my country (Australia) and the next closest server location is in Asia which gives me 100ms ping. Now my ping is usually around 5ms depending on what router I'm using and I have a terrible time when people from New Zealand especially are in the match playing on 60-80ms ping.
Like I said previously, when I party up with people from other states, their ping is anywhere from 30-70ms+ and they dominate. Coming up against them I CAN'T kill them at all even when I shoot first, it's like my bullets hit them in slow motion and they can react easily and melt me. They tell me I move slow and look like a bot to them but on my end i'm zipping trying to be a hard target to hit. Their movement looks like 2x normal speed,
One thing I have noticed happens a lot when we are partied up and this was also very common on MW19 (might be the same engine?) - we can be running together and an enemy pops up, I shoot first according to what i see and hear happening on my screen, I don't even get a hitmarker despite being on target then I see the enemy just instantly die cause apparently my friend shot before me and killed them before I even shot. This has happened with multiple enemies as well, multiple appear in front of us and i shoot at enemy #2 while my friend shoots at enemy #1 but he manages to kill enemy 1, 2 and a 3 out of nowhere. There's a massive discrepancy to what we see on our screens and the only difference we have is his ping is almost 10x mine.

The R3 does it's job but it can't magically make your bullets register how they should, that's up to the game and your opponents - the matchmaking doesn't prioritise the connection of your opponents, so when you get connected to laggy people from across the country most of the time, you're going to get poor hit registration no matter what router you're using. I sit single digit pings but get penalised heavily, the game just feels delayed when there's people with crap connections in the match. If everyone's under 20ms (rare) it feels amazing. They've tried to make the game playable for everyone no matter your ping but it's not perfect, there's a reason why people geo filter to servers further away to increase their ping, or why some Japanese/Chinese connect to the Australian servers on purpose.
MWIII has given me the worst experience i've had in cod in a long time. My KD is around 2.8 now but I was probably negative the first 2 months from how awful it ran. That's the lowest i've had since like OG MW3 and I'm surprise it's even gotten there with how bad it runs. The only router that has made this game remotely playable is the R2 or R3 - no other router has given me playable matches until recently, I decided to switch to my old Asus router I was running as an AP to router mode and it has been giving me some smooth hit rego. It's running Merlin firmware, I have no fancy settings, just set my console to priority and using Adaptive QoS with my full bandwidth set up. I have found matches run bad if I throttle bandwidth low, unlike some of the older cods.
Some people that I occasionally play with have no issues whatsoever playing via WiFi and they're sitting on 30-70ms ping due to their location. When I vs them for fun in public lobbies, they have the type of connection where you're dead before you can ADS.. they are just synced to the server much earlier than you and have the lag comp on their side. I've tried bumping up my ping but it doesn't give the same experience as having a high ping by default. Maybe it's related to the routing.

The team are actually looking into this specific VPN provider and making it work with the R3 currently as we can't make it work either 

Why is reservation capped to 20 Mbps for download and upload? We should be able to simply "Select Device > Adjust QoS for said device". For someone that has IT experience it feels like I'm navigating through a maze to limit bandwidth on devices.  The current user interface is extremely complicated for no reason at all. With the way the UI is currently setup you navigate to SmartBOOST > click three dots top right > Click manage profiles to manage current "Favorite" (Default profile) > click on profile > add device > click off screen > click "Bandwidth reservation"> Add reservation > choose device > Choose Target [Why????] 
I simply want to limit the bandwidth of my devices without the need to select the target for the device... 
We should be able to limit bandwidth per device similar to how ASUS has it set up:

 

I've only had to reboot mine once on the latest firmware and that was cause I was doing a factory reset. It's been solid otherwise

Please make a new topic and we can help you there
Okay so based on the previous one, it's showing as prioritized but not in stats for nerds so some sort of disconnect going on there. I suspect it is prioritizing and stats for nerds won't be reporting correctly, thanks for letting us know, I will pass it on.

I wonder if it's a bug related to steady ping that's applying to the entire connection instead of gaming packets only, even when it's switched off.

26 hops to google?? what country are you in? that's nuts. I only have 7 hops

Have you compared ping plotter tests? here's what I get R3 vs an old router running openwrt. Ignore the red, it's from changing over routers. As you can see there's over 20 spikes above 15ms on the R3 vs a stable 6-7ms on the old router

I think it's just their QoS algorithm, not sure if it's intended or not. I've noticed with any other router, including the R2, my ping in pingplotter to 6-7ms with the odd spike above 10 like once an hour, if that. The R3 seems to follow a pattern of a few low pings then some higher pings then some lower ones etc. and I get spikes above 20ms (sometimes a lot more) even though my internet isn't being used.
Below screenshots are weeks apart

I think it's just their QoS algorithm, not sure if it's intended or not. I've noticed with any other router, including the R2, my ping in pingplotter to 6-7ms with the odd spike above 10 like once an hour, if that. The R3 seems to follow a pattern of a few low pings then some higher pings then some lower ones etc. and I get spikes above 20ms (sometimes a lot more) even though my internet isn't being used.
Below screenshots are weeks apart

I think you could improve routing with a VPN if your ISP had an issue. I don't think there's anything else you could do on your end. Some smaller ISPs here in Australia can change routes if you complain, not sure if its worth a shot over there?

Have you prioritised ports? device? gaming/voice? normal? / apply to wan?
I haven't had a single good game and I'm around level 40. KD went from 3 > 1
It is the worst cod I have ever played connection wise. Classic feel like half a second behind the enemy, it's really noticeable with the higher ttk

Maybe something has hijacked your browser? scan for viruses
Also try access the router with another browser instead

I changed ISPs recently and my ping to Asian servers went from 125 to 105 and it's actually playable some matches so I don't mind loading in them now. How tf should I be able to top the scoreboard, win head on gunfights etc. with a 105 ping? cod is becoming more ridiculous each iteration.
My ping is aroun 5ms on local servers and if there's people 50ms+ good luck winning any head on gunfights. Even shooting at people running, they just sponge bullets and some don't even register despite being on target. I've tried increasing my ping but it doesn't help so I don't know what their secret is.. maybe being on PC and having the framerate advantage, combined with their high ping makes lag comp favour them? When everyone has low ping I have no issues with PC players but it seems they all liked to play via wifi and jitter heaps
I gave up on trying to find a secret setting that works for MW22. Just plug and play it works some days and those days it doesn't I lobby shop hard looking for low ping players that aren't vpn'ing or just get off
 

R3 would be a beast - octacore, 2GB ram, 1GB flash, tri-band (not 801.11ad though WiFi 6 def), 8 detachable high gain antenna, smart connect/ mesh, zero wait dfs, airtime fairness, 8 port gigabit lan, 1 2.5Gb wan with an sfp port (also able to assign as wan). Slap some fans on the CPU/vrm and maybe have the feet longer with rubber bottoms and an exhaust fan pushing air out. Boom. DumaOS 4.0. MAYBE an RGB badge on the top. 
 
You know you'd buy one.

That's BO4 yeah? I do recall it showing no ping when I was host as well. Some matches were definitely P2P.