Sharing broadband

neon_glows

Hi guys me and two mates are going to rent out a house together soon, we are all queit nerdy and love our broadband.

what broadband connection should we get (im currently on a 3mb line on my own) we will all be heavy torrent users so we will need to come up with some sort of system that load balances our connection so if im using torrents it doesnt stop the lads from viewing the net, ideally i suppose we wud like something that splits the connection into 3, also whats the fastest speed available for less than 50e a month???

8T8

Well taking a guess you would need a router with an ADSL modem built in which would simplify things.

With that in place all of you can connect to the net at the same time. With BT being used that is another factor because BT puts such a strain on the network I would not recommend that you all be downloading multiple torrents at the same time unless you have plenty of upload and download bandwidth.

If you want to keep it usable then you need plenty of upload speed if you devote too much of the upload speed to BT then the others will find it slow going or nothing happening at all with their net connection.

I would suggest limiting it to once person downloading a torrent at a time if you want to be able to keep using the net connection and set the upload speed at least 5-10k below it's maximum rating in your BT client. That should allow you to get the torrent as quickly as possible while not cutting off the others from net access. Alternatively you could divide up the upload/download bandwidth between all three of you and set your BT clients like so an an example;
global: 350K download/ 25k upload
client 1: 110k download 8k upload
client 2: 110k download 8k upload
client 3: 110k download 8k upload

Going any lower than 8k [I think the limit is 10k] upload does impede your BT download speed. That "might" work with at least two of you downloading torrents at the same time dunno about all three though.

If you really want to try and manage lots of torrents and net traffic then maybe something like QoS would be worth checking out though not all routers feature this traffic shaping technology. It basically allows you to set rules which can prioritise the type of data that traverses the network.

Orion

If you get a Linksys router there's a 3rd party flash you can get which provides the capability for throttling pcs.

Alternatively if you have an old 400Mhz box you can install ClarkConnect on it and use that to throttle based on application or pc.