I'd like to limit the download speed for my laptop so I don't lag out the gamers in my home by browsing.

[RedMiles]

My nephew plays lots of League of Legends and similar games. I literally cannot use the internet while he's doing it; he starts to go into a blind panic about his sudden lag and freaks out. He's really anxious about it; our ISP is also kinda shady so he's a little justified, as a sudden lag spike could mean incoming connection troubles.

Is there a quick, easy way to get my laptop to throttle itself without having to mess with the router? We use a 4G router and, going back to my ISP being shady, they don't like us messing with router settings; the last time I had to do it because the tech support told me to, it was only a very upset conversation with the manager that kept them from considering my changing settings I was told to change a breach of contract. It's that kind of ISP.

So I need a way to do this that doesn't rely on changing router settings. I don't want to deal with that again.

Any suggestions?

 

[skit75]

Not really...
You can try to change your router's DNS to 8.8.8.8 and see if it helps. Also, if he is using the routers wireless connection, running a physical CAT5 cable could help a lot if the latency is due to interference.

 

[RedMiles]

Not really...
You can try to change your router's DNS to 8.8.8.8 and see if it helps. Also, if he is using the routers wireless connection, running a physical CAT5 cable could help a lot if the latency is due to interference.

I literally can't change my router's settings, so that's totally off the table.

And he's using a desktop connected to the 4G router via cable; the issue is whenever I load a web page, it sucks up all the available bandwidth, which causes him to lag badly. I wanted to try to find some way to throttle my laptop so it only uses some of the available bandwidth instead of all of it, to keep me from making his games lag.

 

[skit75]

Inserting a managed switch I guess. The bandwidth is being divided before it gets to your laptop, by the router. So you need to feed a managed switch that would allow you to allocate bandwidth by IP/MAC address.

I really feel sorry for people with internet connection horror stories like this. ToS/EULA blah blah blah....... you should be able to allocate bandwidth within your home as a fundamental RIGHT, using the ISP's equipment without having to purchase additional devices. Maybe somebody has another suggestion that I don't know about.

 

[skit75]

Do you not have access to the router's configuration? Or did they just tell you not to?

How was the service marketed to you? As Broadband? The language could be the key to holding them to the service agreement if you can't both be on the internet at the same time.

 

[RedMiles]

Inserting a managed switch I guess. The bandwidth is being divided before it gets to your laptop, by the router. So you need to feed a managed switch that would allow you to allocate bandwidth by IP/MAC address.

I really feel sorry for people with internet connection horror stories like this. ToS/EULA blah blah blah....... you should be able to allocate bandwidth within your home as a fundamental RIGHT, using the ISP's equipment without having to purchase additional devices. Maybe somebody has another suggestion that I don't know about.

Yeah. I live in the middle of nowhere. The phone company that owns the phone system for this area inherited it in a buyout. The lines were already old and obsolete, and they've affirmed they can't offer landline-based service to this area without replacing the phone lines, and they have no intention of doing so because it's a low-population area. Other ISPs tell us they'd have to run phone lines of their own to provide landline service and they can't because we're too far away from everything.

Wireless is as good as we get. We pay 70 dollars a month for 75gb 4G 'fixed wireless data usage' a month, and they REALLY got pissed when they found out I'd been changing settings, even if it was at Tech Support's direction.

 

[RedMiles]

Do you not have access to the router's configuration? Or did they just tell you not to?

How was the service marketed to you? As Broadband? The language could be the key to holding them to the service agreement if you can't both be on the internet at the same time.

It was marketed to us exactly as what we got. A fixed/home wireless plan. And it's not that we CAN'T be on at the same time, again, it's that whenever I load something in browser it sucks up our entire available download speed to do it. It's only for a few seconds, usually, but that's a few seconds of 800+ ping for anyone playing games, and the gamers in this house tend to like twitchy games where 800+ ping for two seconds might as well be constant 800+.

I was just really hoping there'd be a setting in Windows 8.1 or a third party program I could use to throttle my laptop so I can just use like 50kb/s and not lag everyone.

 

[USAFRet]

75gb 4G 'fixed wireless data usage' a month

You get the entire household through 4G, at a total of 75GB per month.
This sucks.

 

[Soulage]

I used to have to do the same when streaming Netflix before we upgraded our package.
I just used https://seriousbit.com/netbalancer and put a limit on the browser process.

 

[RedMiles]

75gb 4G 'fixed wireless data usage' a month

You get the entire household through 4G, at a total of 75GB per month.
This sucks.

I'm... Not sure if this is sarcasm or not.

But yeah it kinda sucks. With four gamers in the household on PC and console, the bandwidth disappears quickly. We're constantly riding our bandwidth limit and if we go over we can easily end up paying 140 dollars for just going over by a few GB. We can't stream video more than the occasional Youtube video. With so many people on this connection, we can't spare the data usage. It doesn't help that until a few months ago, there was no way to monitor your use through them except calling during business hours and asking someone in the office to check your usage. If you needed to know after hours or on the weekend? Sorry, best not to use it at all than risk the bill.

The service is incredibly sporadic, we average less than half the download speed of their landline service, and they constantly sell us bad routers; we went a month without internet once because they took our router to 'examine' it after stringing us along trying to blame everything but the router; and they just happened to have recently 'upgraded' to better, more expensive routers for sale and couldn't find one of our model of router to replace it with, and they stonewalled for a *month* before they realized we weren't a problem that would go away and sold us one of the new routers at a discount; then charged us for that month's service.

It's a freaking nightmare, man. This ISP is bad news, but it's literally them, satellite, or dialup in this area.

 

[USAFRet]

No, not sarcasm. Just a statement of:
That sucks, and I feel for you.

4 active users, limited download and a 75GB monthly cap...
That sucks.

 

[RedMiles]

I used to have to do the same when streaming Netflix before we upgraded our package.
I just used https://seriousbit.com/netbalancer and put a limit on the browser process.

This seems promising! I'll give it a shot and see how it works out, it seems like something I can turn on and off easily, if I'm doing this right. Thanks!