Managing bandwidth between a shared connection

Woody_FX

Hi guys,

Getting UPC 50mb in a house where there is a few of us living. Is there a way to manage the connection so thats its shared evenly from the router.

Two of us has torrents going a lot, some stream TV a lot and others play some games.

So is there someway in the router we can set it to manage each users bandwidth percentage so one person wont hog bandwidth and degrade the performance of the other users?

I.e. if 1 persons torrents are eating the bandwidth like crazy causing another users streaming TV to be constantly pausing to buffer and the game players connection to be laggy. Would like to avoid people getting irate with each other over it.

Can UPC's router do this kind of thing or should I invest in a different router?

Thanks for the advice.

gouche

We sell these at work.

They allow you to share the bandwidth by IP address.

jor el

The router provided by UPC (a Thomson for 50Mbps) will definitely not do it. You'd need to add an additional router, using the Thomson as a modem only. You can't get rid of that.

Woody_FX

Is the Thompson a good device? Or should I replace that also with something more capable/reliable?

roast

Woody_FX wrote: »

Is the Thompson a good device? Or should I replace that also with something more capable/reliable?

You can't replace the Thomson modem, that will have to stay.

You can bypass the router functionality on it, and use a separate router connected to it though - that would allow you to manage the bandwidth.

Kensington

Get yourself a router that supports an open source Linux firmware like DD-WRT or Polarcloud Tomato for example. These firmwares allow you to set up Quality of Service (QoS) rules - basically you can give prioritise connections such as gaming > streaming > torrenting.

Be warned though, your average consumer grade router isn't going to be able to cope well with a multitude of well-seeded torrents, online gaming and streaming.

Bear in mind too, if you have more than one gaming console behind a NAT router you could run into difficulty.

Cuddlesworth

Torrents kill normal consumer grade box's. Be warned.

Woody_FX

Ok thanks for all the help guys. I'll start looking for info on everything that was mentioned and see if there is a good router for this job of assigning bandwidth and setting up QoS rules.

Slydice

anyone have any suggestions? the link above is not working for me.

one that does bandwidth management but can also be set to follow rules based on cap usages (such as rate limit)?

PogMoThoin

This is a very decent router, its the old spec Linksys (wrt54gl), from before when Cisco started messing about with cheaper components. Elara are an Irish store with very quick delivery.
http://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?productcode=ECE1136421

Then you can put dd-wrt on it.
http://lifehacker.com/178132/hack-attack-turn-your-60-router-into-a-600-router
http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index

That will give you many options including QOS
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Quality_of_Service

vibe666

neither ddwrt or tomato will give you per IP/MAC bandwidth management/throttling though, they will just do QoS and limit the numbers of idle connections which will allow people to keep browsing when torrents are running. that TP link router in the 2nd post is one of the few consumer routers that will allow you to do that. there is an open source firmware for the WRT routers that does the same, but i can't remember the name off the top of my head.

i also wouldn't be convinced that a WRT54GL would comfortably handle the 50mbps broadband with that much user activity with either DD-WRT or Tomato, i'd be tempted go for the Asus RT-N16 or a Linksys E3000 for the extra memory and features.

I used to have a WRT54GS running tomato and it was running at about 80-90% utilisation on my 30mbps UPC. i switched to a Linksys E3000 running the same firmware and it's currently using about 20%, so i'm happy.

PogMoThoin

I can't wait for Mikrotik to release their RB751G next month for the ultimate setup. At the moment I'm using an RB750GL and 2x Linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT as access points (Vibe is right about the Linksys being tight for memory, mine needed a reboot every so often). The Mikrotik is not at all average user friendly, but there are guides if you technically inclined and the community on their forum are great. Its got 5x gigabit ports and is MIMO n wireless with 64MB of ram

http://forum.mikrotik.com/


RB751U and RB751G
- SOHO 2GHz 802.11n AP
- 1W output power
- MIMO (2Tx 2Rx)
Antennas built-in
- High power radio
- External MMCX
- Slightly larger than RB751-2n
- USB 2.0 port
- PoE in
http://www.3dbwireless.com/boyd/?p=479

vibe666

PogMoThoin wrote: »

I can't wait for Mikrotik to release their RB751G next month for the ultimate setup. At the moment I'm using an RB750GL and 2x Linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT as access points (Vibe is right about the Linksys being tight for memory, mine needed a reboot every so often). The Mikrotik is not at all average user friendly, but there are guides if you technically inclined and the community on their forum are great. Its got 5x gigabit ports and is MIMO n wireless with 64MB of ram

wouldn't a linksys e3000 do you just as well? it runs tomato just fine, it's got 64mb ram, dual band dual radio, usb and gigabit ports. and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to work it.

PogMoThoin

vibe666 wrote: »

wouldn't a linksys e3000 do you just as well? it runs tomato just fine, it's got 64mb ram, dual band dual radio, usb and gigabit ports. and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to work it.

You can do so much more with the Mikrotik, but its also in my own interest to know how the Mikrotik works, I do contract work for an Isp who use lots of Mikrotik products

vibe666

PogMoThoin wrote: »

You can do so much more with the Mikrotik, but its also in my own interest to know how the Mikrotik works, I do contract work for an Isp who use lots of Mikrotik products

aha, "i see" said the blind man.

Dazza

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Torrents kill normal consumer grade box's. Be warned.

How do they??

PogMoThoin

Dazza wrote: »

How do they??

Because torrents open too many connections, a single healthy torrent can have thousands of connections. A poor router will have a weak cpu, no QOS settings and won't be able to cope (as in everything Belkin and other cheap brands). There's an awful lot goes on in a router, at lightning speed.

A decent router will have a fast cpu that can handle many more connections and can do QOS, where http traffic gets priority over p2p through the router, meaning you can browse while torrenting at full speed

vibe666

the death of most routers when torrenting actuallycomes about because of a setting called tcp_conntrack, which is a value that defines within the router how long it keeps track of tcp connections.

this setting on some routers is set to anything up to 7 days or more, which for regular web browsing and email checking is fine as each tcp connection is only a tiny amount of data in itself, but as PogMoThoin says, a single torrent can create thousands of connections and over the course of a few hours, the number of connections that the router is keeping track of will basically flood the routers available memory until it falls over and has nothing left to work with.

i bought a linksys wrt54g years ago when i had 3mps dsl because my old router kept jamming up on me and whilst it was better with the stock linksys firmware, the problem was still there to a lesser extent, until (after a lot of digging) i found an alternative firmware that allowed me to edit that setting and it was fine ever since.

as far as i am aware, after torrenting took off and became more popular, a lot of router firmwares got the setting changed automatically, but some isp sourced routers aren't so good at it.

obviously, more ram, faster cpu and other stuff are going to help too, but that little bugger is the core of the issue and it caused me many hours of hurt to put right the first time.

Seifer

Just wondering if you solved this in the end OP?

I'm on a UPC connection getting raped by Netflix making it impossible to play anything so trying to figure out a way to distribute the bandwidth evenly.