I’ve been hanging out rather passively today, because I’ve been doing a lot of networking reconfiguration. For the past few months, I’ve noticed unacceptable latency when trying to play games with my friends from my console upstairs in the bedroom, which is also the furthest away from the router. I tried adding a wireless extender into the loop, to no avail; so signal strength wasn’t the problem. The router and modem were both new. Eventually, after a couple of Mondays spent intensively flipping switches, I discovered the culprit: My router’s firmware had a broken traffic prioritization implementation. I replaced the firmware with a Linux-based solution, configured a proper QoS stack, and now all the various networked devices in my home are much happier.