Some of the real experts on the subject will be along to help but I think your main problem is bandwiidth, unless you can increase that I don't thinki adding an additonal router is going to help you any.  Keep in mind that I could be totally wrong.

Edit the QoS policy in the router so that their bandwidth is a lower priority/lower cap than yours.  This is of course assuming that you're the only one running ping-intensive games, but you can edit it on a per-computer/connection basis if that's not the case.

Both Philly and Phoon are correct that the problem arises when attempting to share the internet connection amongst that many people-or rather, amongst that many people who all act like the connection is theirs and theirs alone.  Upgrading the connection would help, but so would my suggestion.

Do note that bandwidth (download/upload speed) and ping are entirely separate from each other; I could have a connection that lets me download at 30MB/s and still have a ping of 500ms if the connection is particularly terrible, or alternatively if I'm close to my ISP (and whoever I'm pinging) geographically I could pull 50ms on a 256kbit connection.

(Interesting tidbit-Phoon's reply wasn't up while I was typing this, but my system threw a BSOD.)

Haha thanks for the help guys, We have a pretty good internet connection its some form of comcast high speed/broadband. I think I'll try what Sole Soul said. How exactly would I edit the QoS Policy?

If I remember correctly on most routers you can only limit/prioritize it for all wireless clients, rather than setting it individually.

I'd tell you for certain, but I can't access my router anymore.  The config page won't load (I don't even get a login prompt), but I can ping it.  I wonder what the hell's going on...

Look in your manual the the address the modem will have - it may not be one of the ones listed above. e.g. the two Billion modems I have both are 192.168.1.254

Just some extra thoughts on this... I have seen some old routers that can get CPU bound under heavy load. If that's the case, a better router WOULD speed things up.

It's not typically the case, though. The liklier problem is that they're just using a lot of your connection. Two things in particular:

1. If everybody is wireless, the channel can get clogged (same if a lot of wireless routers are in your area). Hooking your computer up using a wired connection will give better gaming performance.

2. P2P programs like BitTorrent clients do a lot of uploading. On a typical home broadband connection, upload is worse then download for your speed, by far. There's technical reasons why, but they don't matter for your purposes. The point is that people should shut these programs down while you're gaming, or at the very least set upload speed caps well below your maximum upload speed.

In my case for example, if I set my upload speed cap to 40 KB/s and let it upload, I get an increase in latency that is annoying, but not too bad. If I let BT upload at 60 KB/s instead, gaming is impossible. My download speeds are over 600 from a good server, so you can see just how badly upload affects things.

Ahhhhhhhhh.

Yeah, it's been a while.  I was thinking it may have had something to do with a certain someone spilling something on it as well, but I'll be pleased if that has not been detrimental.  You were spot on with the slowing down beforehand, though, so hopefully that's it.  I'll check it later-it's not really hurting anything as is.

Modems of all kinds loose sync and it does degrade the service - that's why you should reboot them every so often. dsl is just a lot of modems at different frequencies, so I believe it also happens here.

As for 2 devices, you're better doing what Sole Soul suggested and using QoS.  It's known as Quality of Service for what it does, but used to be called CoS class of service, which describes what you are doing.  You know those port numbers you need to punch through your firewall... they're used here to define service.

You say for example you want your xbox traffic to have priority over bittorrent, you'd configure your router/firewall to give port 3074 (xbox) a higher priority over 6881-6999 (bittorrent).  bittorrent will then download slower, but lag critical things then always work.  That is how your average network engineer would do it  Sure, you can do it via IP addresses, or even MAC's depending on your hardware, but traditionally the industry has looked at traffic rather than individuals.  Again, wireless to a network device is just an interface so these can be applied here.  To be honest, unless your in a large wireless enviroment it's your physical connection to the ISP that's the bottleneck.

To do this check your manual, every vendor does it differently, and that's before we even get to the interface! Manuals generally have the default IP addresses in and default passwords in.  Reading these is apparently is part of what made Kevin Mitnick such a great hacker.  Otherwise tracert as Tridus suggested generally finds it (unless it's in bridging mode).

EDIT: just seen DauntlessAnsible reply - that works too....

as I said above others may be able to help you better, but some Ideas are...

first click the radio button for enable

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Device Priority Section

in the Device Priority section you could specify your computer by entering its MAC address. to find your MAC address go to...

start menu > run > type "cmd" without quotes to get the command prompt window.

in cmd prompt type "ipconfig /all" (again not quotes and leave 1 space between ipconfig and /), hit enter

find the Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection, under this section the "Physical address" is your PC MAC address. it will be formatted in 6 sets of 2 digits (numbers or letters)  separated by a hypen (-) such as XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX.

enter each 2 digit combination in the MAC address field of the router config page. set the priority to Highest.

Not sure if the device name matters, you can probably just enter Resist_the_dawn_PC or something.

also not sure if this method works with wireless connections.

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Ethernet Port Priority

will ONLY effect connections that are wired to the 1-4 LAN ports on the router. so if you have 2 or 3 systems wired you can set yours to high and the others to low.

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Application Priority

you can specify a game (or app) you play online, set the priority to high and specify the port the game uses.

when that port is active the router will give it a higher priority.

make sure to click the "save settings" button at the page bottom or the setting won't apply.

Good information!  I think I have the same router. Time to de-prioritized my kids computers.