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[mike phillips]

Yes, I know it sounds bizarre, but the Amazon Firestick on Prime (as opposed to the Fire TV and Netflix) does not allow selection of 'SD' to stream a movie, and with a detected 30Mb+ d/l connection streams in HD despite my Firestick being set to boot into 720p. This results in a large bandwidth consumption plus no noticeable/desired improvemnt on my smallish TV, and my son's 14Mb ADSL2 is stuttering claiming 'bandwidth too low'. I have suggested to Amazon that they update the soft/firm ware to allow a choice.

Is there an option to somehow limit the download speed for this device on my system so Amazon will 'think' it will only take SD? I use a Billion 8800NL. Will QoS do it and if so how do I go about it?

[Weaver]

> will QoS do it?

No. That's not what QoS means. It's about the priority of traffic in terms of getting sent before other types of traffic. QoS doesn't affect the picture definition of video, the 'quality' is the quality or goodness of timing of delivery. Because streaming video needs to be delivered on time, so that the motion picture does not have time gaps in it, you may very well have heard of the term in the context of video because video needs to be delivered ahead of timing-unimportant traffic.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service

[aesmith]

Looking at the manual it appears that you can rate limit on the Ethernet ports, see under the heading "QoS Port Shaping".   Have a try with that, for test purposes you could connect a PC to one port and see what effect it has on a speed test.

[Weaver]

Rate limiting is something different entirely. That is probably what you want.

[mike phillips]

(Thanks aes - will have a look at that.)

What am I going to change? The Firestick is wifi driven and I assume I see only the wired ports (P1-P4) on the shaping page?

I have fixed the IP address of the Firestick so far.

[jelv]

Could you change the WiFi on the router to be b only?

[aesmith]

That would slow down everything on wireless, but might be effective if there's nothing else using it.   If there are other devices, they'll be fighting for the bandwidth and may make things worse (remember wireless is half duplex).

The only thing I can readily think of is if you have a spare router, disable all the routing and DHCP functions so it's just a switch and AP, set a different SSID and connect it to a rate limited port on the Billion.   Make sure the Firestick is the only thing on that wireless LAN.

(As always in considering these scenarios I find myself wishing for Cisco features, and it reminds me that I really must sort out my own home router)

[Weaver]

@jelv a really horrible idea

@aesmith Cisco features try a firebrick not as flexible as a Cisco, but a whole lot more usable.

An old Thomson Speedtouch modem router, now that really is some cli, for Cisco addicts who want something hard.

[mike phillips]

OK - unable as far as I can see with an 8800NL to port shape for wireless, so I have gone ahead and played with WAN to LAN QoS. Set rate to 1% for the Firestick IP address and got continual buffering, so that works. Now set to 3% and seems to stream satisfactorily (with 'bandwidth' warning which I have suppressed). 2% giving me the occasional spinning wheel. It will be tomorrow when I can judge if the bandwidth useage has dropped to SD levels.

[mike phillips]

A very encouraging report - one film watched 31/12, 14.75GB
Two films yesterday, 4.84GB

I think (hope) I have cracked it! 

With me potentially 'sorted', I am stuck now with my son's problem - a Belkin F5D7630 with no QoS setting I can see in its manual.

[Dray]

Looks to have QOS
http://www.belkin.com/pyramid/AdvancedInfo/F5D7630uk4A-E/Interfaces/MD%20-%20F5D7630-4A-E/qos.stm

[mike phillips]

Thanks, Dray - will have a look, although how to set the wifi QoS looks like a version of the Greek language right now.

[LudaLuke]

Hi Mike,

I'm a relatively new member to the forum here, but potentially I would consider using a cheap-ish wifi router (I've got several myself but the DLink DIR615 is nice and cheap - but is 10/100 on the LAN ports), and flash it with ddWRT this will give you most if not all of the kind of functions you would find on a Cisco switch and thus the ability to limit speed easily.

What you would then be able to do is actually broadcast a separate wifi network to your main one - with a hidden SSID so no one tries to accidentally connect to it - which you could specifically limit the speed on, and not impact the performance of other devices, and also still 'see' other devices (as I guess that the Firestick has something akin to Apple's AirPlay or Google's Cast abilities, if you use them that is).

Hope this helps,

Luke

[Weaver]

A ( very ) belated welcome to LudaLuke then!

[WesBez7]

@mike phillips if you get yourself a ASUS RT-AC56u it has the ability to limit per device using the accompanying app or web interface. (Without needing to use Qos) It's very user friendly as simple as imputing the digits. You can control upload and download. I would also suggest you put ASUSWRT-Merlin on it.
https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/features

The router has the same internals of its bigger bro. https://www.asus.com/uk/Networking/RTAC56U/