I’m a network technician by trade and I can say that in my experience, buffer bloat is almost always caused by the router and not the cable modem. As long as the modem has enough downstream channels for the service that the internet service provider is pushing to it then it should be fine, although the Broadcom chipsets are usually more stable than the Intel/Puma ones. Many consumer grade routers are advertised as being able to handle 1000Mbps speeds but a lot of the time there is marketing shenanigans going on with those claims. The router can operate at the advertised speeds if the traffic is being routed between two devices on the same network behind the router because the router’s built in network switch has dedicated hardware for doing that but if the traffic is going out or coming in from the internet then it needs to be processed by the router’s CPU which is MUCH slower. Usually the garden variety router can only handle about 70Mbps on its CPU and anything trying to transfer faster will queue up in the router’s memory buffer instead of being processed immediately and boom, you’ve got buffer bloat. Setting up the QoS settings on the router will force the router to stop lying about its real transfer speeds to other devices that are connecting to it so the correct transfer rate gets negotiated and you don’t have servers or clients thinking that they are streaming data to a device that can handle 1000Mbps while it really can only do 70Mbps.
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