15Mb X 2Mb connection, how to spread the love?

Bellator

I live in a house with 2 other bandwidth intensive roomates. We recently upgraded to a 15Mb down/ 2Mb up connection, so as to hopefully ease the bandwidth woes.

Unfortunately, between P2P programs like bitorrent, gaming, and run-o-the mill browsing, we're still having trouble spreading out the bandwidth evenly.

Being a network nub (I was psyched just by getting port forwarding figured out), I'm not really sure the best way to evenly throttle the bandwidth between all of us.

I was hoping any network vets out there could recommend some steps to ensure we get equal slices of the broadband pie, so that while individually we may not hit the max our connection allows, we should all be able to game/download/browse at the same time and still see respectable transfer rates/pings (it is a 15Mb pipe after all!)

Thanks in advance for any advice, and the router we are using is a linksys WRT54GS (not sure if this matters)

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Judas

Bitorrent is likely what's causing grief..... they have to set ... using a bitorrent program that works well... a method of setting the limit for download/connecitons/uploading....

Nick0323

Another Linksys user I'm glad to see. I have a BEFSR41 and am running Windows Firewall OFF.

A good start would be to surf the net and play games during the day.

And at night when you don't use the computer put on your utorrent etc. You shouldn't get any problems that way (noticeable problems )

Asmoday

There's a nifty little app called Netlimiter that should do the trick..

Matth

Put this between modem & router, perhaps?
Hawking Technologies

Or how about
cFosSpeed, faster Internet access with Traffic Shaping

A little unclear, but from the release notes, it appears that co-operative multiuser mode is now available (at least in the beta), since version 4.

Not got long if you want the 3 licence deal - that's 3 & lifetime update too!

kris23

i got 2 of those sitting next to me, they arent very reliable, they kick you off the internet after a while

Bellator

Thanks guys, I've been exploring QoS options, but now I learn that QoS on my particular router kinda stinks, and the third party firmware that has good QoS won't work on my particular wrt54gs (v7 ).

Bit torrent definitely seems to be the real culprit, namely because the simultaneous connections are cloggin the router (and in the default linksys firmware I can't up the number of connections), out of curiousity does anyone know what the max number of connections is on linksys wrt54g routers? can't seem to find the information...

Thanks!

H3X4D3C1M4L

If you're really serious about fixing the problem, set up a dedicated internet server (or a small embedded box or the like) with a BSD based operating system and use altq + pf

Judas

Alternatively, for the amount of connections and traffic your dealing with, your going to need a decent and rather expensive router to cope with it, reguardless of the the speed your internet may be capable of, bittorrent will go absalutely ape on it, and swallow everything it can whole. Invest is a damn DAMN good router, and you should see a major improvement, just be forwarned, even on the more expensive ones, you can completely trash the big ones to, that's why alot of ISPS don't like bittorrent as alot of the default or optimised clients running out thier even destroy major ISPs networks with the insane load.