If your buffer bloat rating is showing an “F” then the most probable cause is that your router is not fast enough to keep up with your internet speed. If your router is one of the common brands that you can get at big box stores like Best Buy or Office Depot (such as Linksys, Belkin, Netgear, etc) for between $100USD and $200USD then it probably maxes out at speeds of around 70-100Mbps. Let’s say that your internet speed is 200Mbps for this example. If you are doing something that is actually saturating your internet connection and causing it to run at speeds greater than the router is capable of handling in real time (ie more than ~70Mbps) then the router will start to fall behind which will begin to cause problems for the apps that are streaming the data from the internet. If you are playing an online game, you will see your ping spike way up and you will begin to experiencing rubber banding. If you are streaming video, you will start to experience quality drops and/or buffering. If you are streaming textures from Bing, you will notice the low quality textures being swapped in and out as the high quality textures are loaded. In order to fix the issue, you would need to get into the router’s configuration interface and see if it supports setting a maximum upload speed and then finding the right speed to set that to so that you minimize the buffer bloat score. Alternatively, you could purchase a more expensive router that has faster hardware to better take advantage of faster internet connections. It’s tricky to figure out which router to buy though because there is so much misinformation printed on the boxes. You really have to do your research.
1 Like