Help needed to optimise XR500 for Stadia

[XR500J]

I recently purchased the XR500 to make the most of Stadia as I was struggling to get acceptable performance due to lot's of Netflix streaming in the home and no QoS features on my previous router.

However I'm confused as to how best to optimise the XR500 for Stadia. I have read through the guide on optimising QoS, but that appears to be aimed towards traditional gaming devices. 

I also tried making use of the traffic optimisation feature by adding the laptop used for stadia and manually entering the UDP ports 44700-44899, and the red dot lights up to show that that high priority traffic is being picked up, but my understanding is that's not suited to high bandwidth applications such as stadia.

I've also noticed DumaOS doesn't have any pre-configured rules for Stadia, the way it does for console and pc gaming. Is that something that might change in a future firmware update?

Can anyone possibly help me with regards to the best settings to use?

[Netduma Jack]

Hi XR500J, welcome to the forum

So with Stadia, we're currently playing around with our own one in the office and trying to figure out what we can do for it. We'd already planned for its release and have a few key features which will help a lot - they're coming in DumaOS 3.0, which will be out soon.

You're right in that it's not traditional in any way - Anti-Bufferbloat won't help here, nor will Traffic Prioritization. Since Stadia gobbles up bandwidth, the best you can do for it is give it all the bandwidth it needs with Bandwidth Allocation. We'll be interested to see if there's ways to change which Google server it's connecting to using the Geo-Filter, though only time and testing will tell!

For now, give it a load of bandwidth and see how you get on - but keep your eyes open for DumaOS 3.0 (which will be coming to XR500 and other platforms).

[XR500J]

Thank you for your response.

I'll look forward to DumaOS 3.0 then.

In the meantime I have done what you suggest with regards to bandwidth allocation. Should I be disabling "share excess" too. I know it's recommended that I don't normally. But I've found when it's enabled if I'm using Stadia (which I've allocated a large percentage of the bandwidth) and someone in the home suddenly starts playing Netflix for example, my Stadia stream starts stuttering really badly.

Also as no one in the home uses a traditional console, should I set anti-bufferbloat to Never? I'd be curious to know what the implications are of setting it to always or detect when high-prioirty traffic, and having my stadia ports set to high priority.

Thanks again

[Netduma Fraser]

I would probably suggest you do disable Share Excess in this case. If you don't have issues with streaming causing lag/buffering usually then you could set this to never and since you want a lot of bandwidth I'd set this to never. If you set to When High Priority Traffic Detected it would only kick in when Traffic Prioritization is active which it would be since you've added it to Traffic Prioritization.