I'm impressed with this router

[redwing497]

Just wanted to extend my feelings on my purchase to the community here.  I'll try to keep it short.  I've been playing (mostly) CoD on Xbox Live for over 10 years.  Once I moved to a fiber connection (Verizon Fios), I started having issues.  I'm sure some of you know what I'm talking about.  Rubber bullets seemingly doing no damage, straight up hit detection issues, everyone else having the jump on you, and opponents with seemingly instant reaction time who melt you instantly.  I'm not a special player at all, but had 2.5+ K/D in Cod4 and MW2.

 

I chalked it up to the game giving an advantage to higher ping times to "balance things out" and figured low pings like myself get screwed.  This actually made me skip out on the last 3 CoD games until WW2 (well, that and the jetpacks).  Anyway, I bought WW2 and again was having the same problems noted above where i struggled just to break even.  I almost gave up but instead decided to do more research.  That's where I learned about Netduma and this thing called bufferbloat.

 

I always tested my ping times on speedtest.net and got super low pings.  What I didn't realize was that, due to my dated ISP-provided router, my pings would spike constantly sometimes to over 1000ms.  I took a chance on the XR500 and made the following changes:

• Ran ethernet from the optical terminal (essentially the modem mounted outside my house) to the XR. Old router was COAX (MoCA)
• Ran ethernet from the XR to my Xbox 1 (was previously connected via ethernet from a network extender)
• Tested bufferbloat on dslreports (didn't know you could do this!) at full speeds (50down/50up) Always a C or worse
• Experimented with the sliders in QoS during the typical time of night and network traffic when I'm gaming until I got an "A" for bufferbloat.
• Prioritized gaming traffic

I won't list all of the settings since most of them are on by default, but I've had 2 gaming session since making the changes and the difference is absolutely amazing.  Before, I would get 1 game out of 15 per night where it felt like it was running like it should.  Now, I'll get 14 out of 15 games that run like it should and when it doesn't, it's just a laggy lobby.

 

All this and I haven't even messed with the GEO Filter settings yet!  Further, I'm upgrading my speed soon and the ISP with have to install a NEW optical terminal because mine is ancient and needs to be replaced.  I have no doubt this will improve my experience even further once I dial in the QoS settings.

 

Once that's done, I may tinker with the GEO filter.  I do have one question though, would changing to a different DNS improve my experience further? Verizon's DNS are sort of notorious for being congested, so I was considering doing Google DNS at least just on the Xbox One.  I think you can manually change it.

 

Anyway, sorry for the long post but I just wanted share my thoughts.  This router and software has essentially renewed my excitement for online gaming.  I realize it's a small sample size right now, but I'm very confident these improvements are permanent.  Thanks Netduma!

[Netduma Fraser]

Fantastic to hear you've found settings that work for you & that you've enjoyed your experience with the router! Really glad it's renewed your excitement for online gaming

 

In terms of DNS it won't give you any benefits when it comes to gaming, though some people argue it does. It may give you slightly faster website load times. 

[BIG__DOG]

As Fraser said it does not really do anything changing DNS settings, but if you do, 1 of the fastest is googles.......... primary: 8.8.8.8 and secondary: 8.8.4.4

 

You could always download and run dns benchmark which can be found here