How to prioritize my laptop on our wifi network?

[rowlfe]

The best you can do is swap out the router for a stock modem and then buy a commercial router like your ISP uses. The AT&T device does not have the ability to throttle individual connections like a commercial router has, nor will it work as a modem alone. Check out thrift stores. Recently, I picked up an upgrade to my router (same manufacturer but newer with wireless capability) for $10 and a 24 port commercial grade router suitable for an ISP for $15. All I did was unplug the 4 devices from my router, daisychain the new one and plugged everything into the 24 port router. Then, I disabled he DHCP server in my original router and enabled the DHCP server in the new router. And BINGO, it worked like gangbusters. and now I've got ports to spare. I do NOT use wireless because of the party line effect.

By the way, the slowdown you experience is called "the party line effect" and wireless and cable broadband connections both suffer from it. DSL does NOT since DSL is a dedicated phone line connecting a port on your router with a port on the router at your ISP, with no sharing the bandwidth. The reason why cable and wireless experience a slowdown is the access point which can only talk to one user at a time. Which is exactly how a telephone party line works in real life. The more users, the slower everyone goes as the access point cycles through all the users one by one. While someone else talks, all you can do is listen and wait for the line to clear. When the line clears, everyone waiting tries to talk and interfere with each other, and no one gets through for a while. Eventually, the traffic jam clears and one user gets the floor which forces everyone else to wait again. All that time waiting is dead time, with none of your data moving. SPEED remains constant since that is a function of the radio frequencies used, but THROUGHPUT (amount of data moved per unit time) suffers greatly the more users there are competing for access. It seems to me that throttling everyone else so you can play a silly game is SELFISH... Why not just play at a time when no one else is using a computer on your network? The best performance will be had if you use ONE computer running ONE application. Adding any more computers or applications will only slow all of you down as the fixed rate of data flow from your ISP is divided more ways. One application gets the full amount of data, while two applications each gets half of what it would get if alone.