Controlling Network Bandwidth with AEBS?

[THX1139]

Howdy!

Anyone have an idea of how I can throttle down usage for other users on my wireless network? Often my connection slows to a crawl even though I'm on 6MBPS cable connection. I suspect that my roommate is using a torrent client and it's sucking up all the bandwidth. Tonight, my connection was super fast but then slowed to dialup speed 10 minutes after he went into his room. I thought that instead of confronting him, I'd just figure out a way to throttle back his bandwidth whenever the network slows down. I've searched the internet and the Airport manual and can't find specific instructions on how to do that or if it's even possible. I'm getting desperate and soon I'm going to have to kick him off the network. While he is paying a share of the monthly service expense, I didn't hook all of this up in order to have a dialup experience!

If there is no software that will allow for specific bandwidth control, someone should write it and make a ton of money. It would be cool to select a computer on the network and then control how much bandwidth that machine is getting percentage wise.

 

[janey]

I don't think it's doable with your hardware.

You can definitely do it on a lot of other routers though, and on your own computer.

I see an option to do something like it on my wrt54g with dd-wrt...


edit: you should tell your roomie to cap both upload and download speeds to ~80% of the available bandwidth. not because it's pissing you off, but because if he is torrenting, not capping either one is going to end up slowing down everything, including the downloading of the torrent - and I'm not kidding.

 

[THX1139]

I don't think it's doable with your hardware.

You can definitely do it on a lot of other routers though, and on your own computer.

I see an option to do something like it on my wrt54g with dd-wrt...


edit: you should tell your roomie to cap both upload and download speeds to ~80% of the available bandwidth. not because it's pissing you off, but because if he is torrenting, not capping either one is going to end up slowing down everything, including the downloading of the torrent - and I'm not kidding.

Thanks Janey! Yeah, I'm thinking there is no feasible way to do it with the AEBS. Searched all over the web and nada. What I did was ask him to limit his downloading to certain hours when I'm less likely to be on the computer. One other thing I thought was strange; whenever I do a download (or my roommate for that matter), the network bogs way down, even though the download speed is 100K or less. Well, we have cable so why is the overall connection speed slowing down? Certainly there is enough bandwidth in the pipe to keep other connections to the web snappy? I'm thinking it's our cable company who is detecting a torrent in progress and throttling back the connection. Seriously, you can be transferring a file at 56K, and suddenly it takes 10 seconds or longer to load just to load google.

 

[macleod199]

Thanks Janey! Yeah, I'm thinking there is no feasible way to do it with the AEBS. Searched all over the web and nada. What I did was ask him to limit his downloading to certain hours when I'm less likely to be on the computer. One other thing I thought was strange; whenever I do a download (or my roommate for that matter), the network bogs way down, even though the download speed is 100K or less. Well, we have cable so why is the overall connection speed slowing down? Certainly there is enough bandwidth in the pipe to keep other connections to the web snappy? I'm thinking it's our cable company who is detecting a torrent in progress and throttling back the connection. Seriously, you can be transferring a file at 56K, and suddenly it takes 10 seconds or longer to load just to load google.

It generally has much more to do with how much is being uploaded. In order to download something successfully over a TCP connection you need to be able to send acknowledgment packets regularly. If the sender isn't receiving acknowledgments, it will throttle its sending speed. So the key is to make sure to throttle your *upload* speed in Bittorrent, otherwise it will slow down your downloads as well (as someone else implied above, a little less directly), in bittorrent and everything else.

This wouldn't be such an issue if providers gave you symmetric upload and download bandwidth, but 'most' people want more download than upload.