[Fineus]

I'm in a student house on a shared router (4 computers wireless, one connected directly) that connects to an NTL cable line.

From time to time, one of us is downloading a large file that ties up all the bandwidth - annoying everyone else.

Is there an application out there that can function as a throttle - perhaps by IP address - only allowing each computer a certain approximate percentage of the overall bandwidth... allowing me to limit one persons overall usage to 1/5 of the total available?

[Martinus]

Linux has such tools built in but I don't think there's any free Win* alternative.

[Flipside]

Make sure you have the computer that connects directly to the Net, it always gets first dibs on the Bandwidth. It's one of the reasons I donated my second computer to be the server

[Fineus]

I'm not sure it works that way... our set up is this:

NTL cable modem (to) Router (to) My PC (linked via a CAT5) and everyone elses via Wireless.

[Flipside]

Hmmm.. Well the only evidence I have to that, I'll admit, is the fact that my brother used to complain when I was torrenting and he was trying to play Eve, because his system started to lag to death

[an0n]

Yeah, only with domestic NTL you don't need to be using the same connection to get other people lagging your ****ing connection.

I get 7sec lag on WoW because NTL are ****ing dip****s. They made the lines to handle MAYBE 100Mbit, then get 500 people on one local hub, all with 3Mbit connections.

And I can't download **** from Rapidshare because it takes the local exchange's IP, meaning everyone within 50 goddamn miles falls under the same 50Mb download cap.


As for your problem: Just use the firewall to kill their access completely when you want to do something.

[Fineus]

I feared it would come to that... quite a shame that NTL functions that way as well. We've found our line running quite a lot slower than it really should at this point.

I also really didn't want to totally kill other peoples connections either - the idea would be to limit my own connection (as well as everyone elses) so that regardless of what one person is downloading - the others will have a decent performance if they wanted to browse the internet etc.

Ah well...

[Cyker]

If you had Linux or Windows Server or a high-end (i.e. rip-off) Cisco router, you can use traffic-shaping tools and QoS settings to balance the load more fairly.

Sadly I don't know of any consumer routers that have such features, aside maybe from that LinkSys with the hacked Linux firmwares...

[Nix]

Well, if they're running wireless, and you have a wireless AP that's switchable between 11 and 54, just make them run at 11 all the time.  That'll take quite a bit of bandwidth down right at the start from the others.  As far as limiting them further, your router *might* have some sort of bandwidth throttle for shared IP's but I would think that your Router must be serving the wireless in order to throttle.  If your PC is serving the wireless, you'll have to use some other software, which I have no idea about.