QoS router vs. long ethernet cable

Question

So I'm a CS student currently taking some online summer classes at my mom's house. So far, I had one class, through Jitsi videocall, and the connection went horribly.

I know for a fact that our home's current plan has 100mbs, but with 14 devices connected simultaneously, it makes it a lot slower. Also, my room is a bit far from the router.

I was going to get a long Ethernet cable + adapter for my laptop, but I just thought today that another choice I have is that, since I'm moving out in a few weeks and I'm gonna need a router anyway, I can just get a router that has better coverage + QoS/bandwidth allocation tools to fix the issue.

Could anyone confirm that buying a router with better coverage and allocating more bandwidth to my laptop would help with connection problems? Or should I get an Ethernet cable either way? Or both? I had my eye on this one.

Thanks!

Answer 1

with 14 devices connected simultaneously, it makes it a lot slower.

The number of devices connected with the network is irrelevant[*] unless they're all actually using their connections.

[*] Wireless devices each do use up a very small portion of the air time which increases with distance (=low connectivity bandwidth), but that shouldn't be really noticeable.

Also, my room is a bit far from the router.

That's likely the cause of your connectivity problem. With Wi-Fi, distance reduces bandwidth.

Better coverage is likely to improve your situation, but without you providing more details it's impossible to say. With a long distance and obstacles in the way, there's only so much you can do. The easiest way is to just try.

If you want to be sure to solve the problem the most reliable way is to run a Cat-5e cable for Ethernet which easily provides 1 Gbit/s for up to 100 m. (The standard requires 90 m of solid-conductor, rigid cable and a maximum portion of 10 m of stranded, flexible cable, but if you don't max that out you usually get away with 20 or 30 m of stranded cable).

QoS/priorization only helps when the network gets congested. Judging from your scarce information, that doesn't seem to be the case.