Tweak your router or modem’s QoS settings

What you need: Two hours

Time required: Router or modem

As you add more devices to your network, the amount of data that passes across it increases. In its default state, your router (or broadband modem if you don’t have a separate router) will manage your devices as best as it can, giving each one equal attention, even if what it’s doing isn’t particularly important. That can be a problem, as it may mean that a laptop downloading updates in the background, which wouldn’t be greatly impacted if those updates ran a bit more slowly, might be causing your video call to stutter and break up. However, if your router or modem has a Quality of Service (QoS) setting, you should be able to tame your network’s data hogs, so the devices that really need a reliable, steady, uninterrupted connection get just that.

Here, we’ll show you how to check whether you have the necessary hardware and, if you do, how to implement QoS on your home network.

1 Understand your network layout

Before doing anything else, it’s important to understand how