[milhous]

Nowadays, many households have several computers sharing a single broadband connection. College students like myself who live off-campus and don't get the convenience of the campus LAN must all share a broadband connection with our roommates.

The problem is that everyone's internet usage is different. While 3 people might be using the net for web, email, IM, etc. , the fourth person might be running Torrents all night long, running IRC DCC, and just downloading day in and day out which hoses the entire connection and people get very irate.

I think one of the biggest pitfalls with these consumer routing products is that they lake the ability to govern/provision bandwidth. I suppose this could be calculated by doing a test of the potential upstream and downstream (or just taking the values that the ISP claims you get) and dividing that value into the number of people who share that connection. Then each person's bandwidth could be "capped" and no single person can be taking all the bandwidth.

Considering that most people won't simply throw out their routers and get the commercial grade stuff that have such features, what is the best or easy way to split the bandwidth equally? Clients are messy and would have to be installed on each machine and of course it's a mixed network of mac/linux/windows.

What I've thought of lately is that somehow, a box would have to sit between the gateway (modem) and the router itself.

I need to hear from some networking folks on what is the easiest and cost-effective way of doing this. Checking around the web, I know that one way it can be done is to use proxy servers, but it would be very incovenient to setup a proxy for each single protocol and as people use different programs over time that protocol would have to be added to the governor.

Nevertheless, I think a lot of people have similar questions, thus it can be applicable to anyone. Thanks.

edit: I know there's a fellow MacNNer that works for Cisco Systems, but I unfortunately forgot what his name is. Hopefully he browses the Networking forum

[Scotttheking]

A small linux box doing traffic shaping sounds like what you want.
You can setup priorities, so someone using a lot of bandwidth can use it if no one else is, etc.
I'd love to help, but that component of my network hasn't made it past the "I need to look into setting this up" stage.

[kampl]

Linux can do the job or perhaps OpenBSD with pf. It's a non-trivial task to setup QoS policies and CBQ. You might have a look at Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control . Decent amount of info and some how-to docs are in there aswell.

[ginoledesma]

My vote goes for either a Linux-based or BSD-based bandwidth limiting solution. Putting something in between your router and PCs is just a messier solution, in my opinion.

[milhous]

Yeah, looks like another box will be needed to provide the governing. I would guess that it would sit between the cable modem and the router.

This type of technology would be great if it was implemented in home routers. Someone could make a killing selling the technology to the conumser networking companies.