Monitor multiple computer bandwidth usage on home network

[tphillips]

Hi,

I live in a rural location where the only internet available to me is through HugheNet Satellite services. Because the set up costs and monthly charge are so high ($500 + shipping for dish + installation costs; $80/month) many of us who live close have opted to share the service. We are on the top tier plan which affords us 425 Mbps/day total download/upload. Once we are out we have to wait 24 hours for it to become available again. My question is there a way to monitor which computers are using the most internet? We are on a closed home network. All computers are Macs and we have two Airport Base Station Extremes to broadcast signal.

Thanks, Tim

 

[pismobrat]

Hi

A couple of options come to mind, and the best solution I would recommend is to replace your router.

Option 1:

Purchase a device like a SonicWALL. I use them extensivly, and they have full bandwith monitoring and can even traffic throttle certain speed hogging applications. Not terribly complicated to setup, but understanding of networking protocals helps.

This guy costs around 350USD for a wireless edition. It is aimed at small business or for people who want to maximizer their traffic. I have a couple of friends who throttle Torrents and other P2P to only a max of 30% of their ISP performance. And the rest is for HTTP.

Option 2:

Purchase a linksys router and install DDWRT.

- There is bandwith usage reporting, not as advanced as the SonicWALL, but pretty good
- There is some traffic trottling capabilities, but to much.


Hope this helps somewhat. There are plenty of wiki's out their about the DDWRT solution