LATENCY, mostly TOTAL LATENCY

[Dimitri Muskens]

Thanks, Stuart... your advice should go over really well in the household since I'm doing 3-4 JK sessions a week, mostly in the evenings --- "Guess what, honey? Not only am I going to be in the studio in another JamKazam session, you can't watch tv or use your computer while I'm out there! How about knitting? You could knit me something [runs away]".

Any suggestions on a router that won't get me living in the garage? Thanks again...

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Another router/modem is hardly gonna do any good when your household is netflixing, gaming a/o up-/downloading at the same time you're trying to do anything with online audio. There will always be 'noise' = jitter = latency.
A 'sneaky' local QoS shaping (and bandwidth pools), giving your UDP traffic priority could help some, but don't expect miracles.
'Having the road to yourself' and disabling/stopping all other network (LAN & inet) use is really the best(only?) key to success where congestion/noise/jitter is in play.

I hear you with the "household" though. A band friend of mine can't even get 2,5h a week for himself to play online - had to stop that collab.

I beg to differ. A properly designed router will help greatly. There are several choices that I personally have experience with. The best, IMHO, is IQrouter, designed specifically to help in this regard. It's very affordable and easy to setup to allow the highest priority to your outgoing realtime audio packets. A second option is to use the openWRT router software on your existing router (if it's supported). You can check their site for a list. Thirdly, routers from ASUS have very robust QoS abilities and you can easily assign bandwidth and protocol priorities to specific devices. Also, any Windows PC Jamkazam users can readily create a QoS policy on their machine to mark all outgoing Jamkazam UDP packets as high priority (think VOIP). This will place them ahead of normal incoming traffic in your QoS-enabled router.
So there's a lot you can easily and affordably do.

In your particular case, I'd consider giving them back their rented modem/router and purchasing your own DOCSIS 3.x modem and an IQrouter. Total cost around $200 and will pay for itself in a year or so depending on the rental amount you're currently paying.

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No problem Stuart. We don't have to agree on everything. (or anything really ;-))
Pls do consider the "... when ..." part in my first sentence. (nothing 'technical' will 'solve' that)
D./

Fair enough In my case, using an IQrouter, my family can now do whatever they like on the Internet while I'm Jamkazaming and things are smooth. None of this can help the inevitable Internet latency itself if course. But at least you won't be adding to the burden at your end.

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Great that you found a workable modus. In these situations balance is important. I do assume the quality of your connection is playing a major part in this.

Please do bear in mind that the only thing you're shaping though is your LAN traffic. You have absolutely no control over what happens after your modem. You can tag priority bits to your (UDP-) data traffic to your heart's content but your ISP or any hop after that is just not going to honour them.

So, outside your LAN it is still just your data plan wrestling with whatever your modem is offering to be processed and whatever the DMZ is offering 'in return'.