Of the things that you have at home what runs at 100% of capacity? Your heating and cooling? No. Your fridge? Your lights? Your Car? No. Would you run your kids, family or dog at 100%? No.

Yet almost everyone expects their Internet Connection to run at 100%. I did. I fell into the trap of running speedtest, fast.com, speedof.me to see if the Internet Connection is working. The only data I had is the speed and latency.

QOS settings would be there, but so hard to use. So blindly think that all is good.

Then I decided to try Pfsense Traffic Shaper. And, one of the first things you need to do is input upload and download to use the network at 96% of top speeds. Why? Because running the network at 100% is not good. And without a traffic shaper the capacity will go to 100% for a large file which affects all other traffic.

Does it work to use Traffic Shaper? The best test is my son saying Xbox One Grand Theft Auto is so much better. Audio is perfect. No lag. No drops. And it is so much more fun to play.

A benefit to me is the inline writing and editing in squarespace is now better as Web pages have a higher priority. VOIP has top priority. Next is Games. Facetime and Web are in the middle. oh yeh game IMAP, POP3, and SMTP a mid level priority too. P2P traffic is the lowest.

Here is an article on setting up PFsense Traffice Shaper.

Thanks to my Netgate SG-2220 and PFsense software running as a firewall with Unifi Cloud Key and Access points I am making improvements in my home network. I also have a Xirrus AP and another router when i really mess things up, but haven't done that for months now.