Bandwidth battle in PW towers !

[Pussywillow]

I could really do with some suggestions here.

We have a number of Pc's and laptops in the aforementioned property. they all use the internet thru a Wireless G Linksys Router WRT54G supposedly running at 8 meg from Virgin (ex Telewest) cable.

Trouble is we have a constant battle over bandwidth. Surfing is fine, everyone can surf to their little hearts content, but when one son wants to start downloading torrents everything else grinds to a halt.

No-one can even surf. So of course we have to ask son #1 to switch off the downloads, so we can use the internet.

Now short of installing a remote device on his PC and turning them off myself what can we do to give a fair cack of the whip to everyone ?

Sure we can have a rota or something, but that just defeats the object. If I want to download torrents I do it at night using a programme launcher to start them at 3am or something, but of course, those of you with adult offspring still living at home will know that that is the middle of the day to them ! So that's no good either.

Is there way to 'allocate' bandwidth around the house so I can regain some semblance of control over the bandwidth in this house?

Please help !

[mjc]

I'm not sure which hardware revision your router is, but the latest Linksys BIOS has 'improved' QoS features...which can be used to 'throttle' back the torrent applications 'on demand'...basically it would shift everything else to have a higher priority than the torrent app. Look through your options in the router's control panel to enable it. It should be under Applications and Gaming...Qos.

[Pussywillow]

thanks for replying mjc.

No. QoS is not present in my firmware on Linksys :(

Should I upgrade ?

[mjc]

Possibly...give the full details on the router. If you go to the Linksys page, it will tell you how to figure out the hardware version.

[Variable]

QoS won't help for several reasons. You need traffic shaping or rate limiting. QoS would help routing internally, so if the traffic congestion was because your PC 1 was connecting to PC2 and using a lot of bandwidth and you wanted PC3 to talk to PC1 with priority, then QoS would help in certain circumstances. It won't help with packets coming in from the internet and outbound would be useless because all the routers in the loop have to use the QoS bit. There is also the issue on when the stream starts. In any case, the router probably has plenty of bandwidth on it's backplane (how much traffic it can handle on the device itself), the problem is the WAN side internet port is a bottleneck.

[Pussywillow]

Right....ok.....what do you suggest ?

would any of this bandwidth management software help ?

[Variable]

Probably not, but to be honest, I don't know what the new consumer grade routers have in the way of rate limiting. I would assume very little, as this is a more complex bit of network magic usually found on more expensive routers.
I have the same problem as you when at home, I usually tell my kids to stop doing whatever it is they are doing or I unplug their network cable. There is no solid way to do it without rate limiting even then, it a UDP stream, like say streaming audio/video when confronted with rate limting would make it unuseable. It would work fine for TCP streams like a file download because the packet that was dropped because of the rate limit would be requested again. Streaming UDP just sends the packets and doesn't care if they get there or not. If you don't understand my explanation let me know what is confusing and I will explain it better.

[Pussywillow]

Probably not, but to be honest, I don't know what the new consumer grade routers have in the way of rate limiting. I would assume very little, as this is a more complex bit of network magic usually found on more expensive routers.
I have the same problem as you when at home, I usually tell my kids to stop doing whatever it is they are doing or I unplug their network cable. There is no solid way to do it without rate limiting even then, it a UDP stream, like say streaming audio/video when confronted with rate limting would make it unuseable. It would work fine for TCP streams like a file download because the packet that was dropped because of the rate limit would be requested again. Streaming UDP just sends the packets and doesn't care if they get there or not. If you don't understand my explanation let me know what is confusing and I will explain it better.


I am using TCP on our wireless LAN and it's downloading thats the problem. Wish our offspring were kids so I would have some control over all this. They are 23, and 21....

[Variable]

Well they are old enough to pay for their own ISP line. Have your ISP run a second connection and let them use it. My kids's are teenagers, if they are still in my home when they at 21 they will still follow my rules or they can buy their own bandwidth. But maybe I will just plug in an old Cisco router and rate limit them :)