QOS for Skype?

RouterOS General
1

Skype is a marvelous thing - it is a form of P2P VOIP that works very well.
The thing that messes up Skype the most is packet latency, and this is particularly bad if you use ADSL and the upstream Internet Connection is congested from you to your ISP. Typical cause is P2P outbound from filesharers on your network, but it can be anything outbound.

To fix Skype, it needs top priority through my RouterOS Box. It seems that Skype can’t be detected by RouterOS, so can I make a Queue with P2P, WWW, SMTP, FTP etc etc and give it all a medium priority, then assume the undetected Skype will take a higher proirity when it arrives?

Any ideas on prioritising Skype Calls?

Steve Head
TBI

2

Yes, you can create mangle rules for any of those services and then set up queues for that.
Check out what port(s) Skype uses to communicate with.
Then you could set Skype’s priority higher than anything else.
This is how you do that for HTTP and “the rest” for a 1.5mbit link:
/ip firewall mangle add in-interface=01-IFACE action=passthrough mark-flow=Unmarked
/ip firewall mangle add in-interface=01-IFACE action=passthrough protocol=tcp dst-address=:80 mark-flow=HTTP

/queue tree add name=Main parent=global-in flow=“” limit-at=1500000 queue=default priority=1 max-limit=1500000 burst-limit=0 burst-threshold=0 burst-time=0
/queue tree add name=“02-Unmarked” parent=Main flow=Unmarked limit-at=500000 queue=default priority=2 max-limit=1500000 burst-limit=0 burst-threshold=0 burst-time=0
/queue tree add name=“01-HTTP” parent=Main flow=HTTP limit-at=1250000 queue=default priority=1 max-limit=1500000 burst-limit=0 burst-threshold=0 burst-time=0

The 02-Unmarked queue is to catch all with priority set to 2
The 01-HTTP queue is for 80 tcp with priority set to 1 (higher than 02-Unmarked)
01-IFACE is the interface you want to do shaping on.

3

Thanks Yazzy; The trouble with Skype is that it chooses a random port, and I have no control over this.

Skype likes UDP>1024 in/out, so I’ll try UDP >1024 = Top Priority.