Nighthawk XR500 fix for game lag spikes and low upload (Disable QOS)

[Goats]

Picked up this router so that I could avoid a divorce when my wife is streaming and I'm gaming. QOS looked incredibly attractive. Router was appropriately set up with Xbox in DMZ and UPnP enabled (NAT was open).

Unfortunately the following symptoms developed:

• Lag spikes while playing R6S on xbox up to the 3000 range resulting in autokick
• Extreme auditory distortion reported by friends coming from my end in party chat or on Skype
• Xbox statistics reporting Download of ~50Bmps and upload of .09Mbps despite having Gigabit internet
• Packet loss of 10%+
• Poor performance across all devices on network

Attempted fixes:

• Redistributing QOS allocations
• Playing with different Bufferbloat settings
• Getting latest firmware
• Assigning new  public IP (thought the external LAN access and DDoS attacks reported in log could be source of problem)

Actual fix:

Checked out Tom's Guide and he suggested trying to disable QOS and see how that goes. It went well. Download speed on Xbox now reported at 600+Mbps and upload 29+Mbps and zero packet loss. It appears that QOS simply does not work on this router.

This is incredibly disappointing as it is one of the only reasons I picked up this expensive piece of kit. This is on top of a constant internet disconnect issue I was having which was resolved by turning off the always on feature of my Xbox. I will be holding on to it for now to see if Netgear can figure out the firmware and get it going. Hope this helps someone as I myself was pulling my hair our and losing sleep.

[Netduma-Fraser]

Sorry to hear you're having an issue. A few questions to help me get a better sense of the situation:
Are you using the Geo-Filter with the game?
Are you using a wireless headset/microphone in close proximity to the router?
How did you manage to saturate a 1gbps connection from just a stream and gaming to the point that it caused you lag?
Are you using IPv6, PPPoE or VLAN?

[Goats]

Hi Fraser,

Sorry for the delay, was giving it some time to get proper diagnostics.

Geo-filter is set to America and Canada Central to East.

My headset is wireless and I'm sitting close to the router but it was never an issue before and isn't now that QOS is diabled.

Regarding the saturation of the 1gbps connection, that's a very good question. My guess was the QOS was throttling what it wasn't supposed to. All devices had poor download and non-functional upload.

IPv6 isn't possible for me. No PPPoE or VLAN.

[FURRYe38]

Did you manually set ISP speeds UP and Down on the router under QoS? 

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@Goats wrote:

Hi Fraser,

Sorry for the delay, was giving it some time to get proper diagnostics.

Geo-filter is set to America and Canada Central to East.

My headset is wireless and I'm sitting close to the router but it was never an issue before and isn't now that QOS is diabled.

Regarding the saturation of the 1gbps connection, that's a very good question. My guess was the QOS was throttling what it wasn't supposed to. All devices had poor download and non-functional upload.

IPv6 isn't possible for me. No PPPoE or VLAN.

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[Netduma-Fraser]

That's a huge Geo-Filter range, put that to 1000km to make it tighter and get a closer server. Okay strange, toggle SIP ALG in WAN Settings as well, that may help with chat with QoS on and in Internet Setup change the connection to static rather than dynamic. Then make sure you've put the speeds you've paid for in Anti-Bufferbloats settings, set to Always and put the sliders to 70% for download & upload. Do a wired PC speed test, do you get the expected results? If so don't worry about the console test for now, see if you get the disconnects/lag spikes and auditory issues.