How to actually use QoS without making things worse, and why "Gaming Mode" labels on routers are mostly marketing.
Why it matters
Bufferbloat is one of those problems that does not show up in a speed test. The test runs, the number is fine, and yet your video call freezes the moment someone in the house starts a backup.
The cause is excess buffering deep in the network. When buffers fill, latency balloons. The fix is active queue management — CAKE or fq_codel — running on the right hop. We ship it enabled by default on every FaultLine router.
What we are doing
This is the kind of thing we like to talk about publicly. Where we are early, we share the math. Where we are wrong, we say so. We would rather customers trust us to communicate honestly than wish away every problem.
"The best way to be trusted is to be trustworthy in small things first." — engineering team motto
What it means for customers
- No action required if you are on a current plan — changes apply automatically.
- If you want to opt out, controls are in your account settings.
- If you see anything strange, please tell us.
We keep an open changelog of everything we ship to the network. If you would like to be alerted when we publish postmortems or major changes, subscribe to the RSS feed at /blog.rss.