Improve Your Bandwidth-Heavy Activities With Router Tweaks

We’ve gone through a few ways to ensure a fast internet connection when you need it, but if your voice and video chats are of sub-par quality, there are actually quite a few different settings you can tweak for optimal connection.

Photo by comedy_nose.

PC World has a great guide to tweaking the more advanced settings of your router for optimizing your router for VoIP and video, though the same rules can apply for any bandwidth-heavy activity like file sharing or video games. While we’ve discussed a few of the options before (namely QoS and port forwarding), PC World also mentions a few settings we haven’t touched on before, like using a DMZ, splitting your traffic between two wireless networks, wireless multimedia extensions and wireless intelligent stream handling.

All these settings basically help perform the same task: allocate more of your bandwidth to one important activity whenever they’re going on, so all the other things you’re doing don’t suck it up and leave you with poor quality video chats (or video games, or BitTorrent speeds). They also discuss where to find these settings on six of today’s most popular routers, so even if you haven’t delved into your router’s settings too often, it should be easy enough to follow along. Hit the link to check out the guide, and share your own bandwidth allocation tips with us in the comments.

How to optimise Your Router for VoIP and Video [PC World]