Bandwidth control rule in TP Link WiFi router TL-WR740N affects my own computer

Question

In my home wifi network, I have listed some devices to allocate the bandwidth. I am using TP Link WiFi router of model number TL-WR740N.

Under Bandwidth Control -> Rules List, I have a couple of devices i.e. android phones. I have mentioned Egress Bandwidth and Ingress Bandwidth in Kbps. They are based on IP address taken from DHCP -> DHCP Clients List.

Everything was working pretty fine before a problem started. My computer was assigned an IP 192.168.0.100 and it is not listed in the Bandwidth control list rules. The two other android devices with IP addresses 192.168.0.101 and 192.168.0.102 are in the list with a low bandwidth. But today, when I started using internet on my computer, I realized that I was not getting high speed.

Then I checked the TP Link configuration, then I saw the same IP address devices were listed in the rules. So it was OK like before but when I saw the DHCP clients lists to see the connected devices then I was shocked to see that my computer's IP address was changed from 192.168.0.100 to 192.168.0.102. So finally I came to know that why I was not getting good internet speed like before and I was just added in the rules list.

The rule I defined for other devices was automatically applied to my own computer without my knowledge. So I am wondering how can I fix it? Is there any solution so that I can keep my computer's IP address static and it doesn't change. It must be always equal to 192.168.0.100. Please help me on this topic.

Answer 1

The router's DHCP Clients List doesn't show static mappings if any device gets it's IP via dynamic DHCP assignment. The router's DHCP server assigns the next free IP from the range to a newly connected DHCP requesting device.

Within your computer's operating system you can assign a static IP to your network adapter with the router IP as gateway, thus it doesn't use DHCP and the router cannot change your IP from outside, but you need to make sure the router's DHCP range for other devices doesn't include this IP to avoid collision. Or you can enable DHCP on the computer side and on the router set up DHCP -> Address Reservation to make sure it assigns the IP to one specific network device MAC address only and always, which never failed on my TP-Link routers.

Bandwidth control requires static IPs or at least static IP ranges. For example entry "192.168.0.101 - 192.168.0.200" may match the dynamic DHCP range while entry "192.168.0.100" matches only your static computer IP. A defined minimum means ensured bandwidth from your defined total bandwidth. Any device IP outside the bandwidth rules list probably gets a minimum of 0bps, so they will get only what's left, if any. Better make sure all devices are within the rules.

Bandwidth control is not good in TP-Link routers with stock firmware. I also have a TP-Link router, a much newer model. The default bandwidth is not evenly split between devices but apparently connections. With enabled and properly configured bandwidth control one IP with many connections (parallel downloads), lower set minimum and unlimited maximum ("0") still can steal bandwidth for other IPs with higher set minimum so their minimum is undershot, which violates the defined rules.