online gaming and downloading at the same time

[Casperiously]

Hello,

I am living in a house with 5 people constantly playing online video games and one person downloading at the time is making others go nuts. Ofcourse, we do download at nights, but still u get plenty of downloading when your system wants to upgrade or something. This has to end today. I am currently using a 10mbs BT, but that will change within few weeks. Now about the router. We are using the standard BT one with no features on it. I do know theres a feature on some newer ones that u can split the internet. Does it work like - U set 10mbs to one computer, and 10mbs to other, and when the first one is downloading something, the rest's ping is stable? Money doesnt matter, may aswell spend 200f on it. Please recommend me some routers that will work the way I want it to.

 

[bill001g]

What you want is called QoS. The best ie most options, is in third party firmware like dd-wrt. Your current router may or may not support third party firmware you have to dig around. The key is to be able to limit the DOWNLOAD rates. Most routers an only do upload rates. Now I will assume you do not mean torrent downloads. If you are running torrents it has features that will attempt to get around any limitations you place on it. This is to prevent ISP from blocking or delaying it.

What you are asking for is actually fairly complex. It is much simpler to say always limit machine xxx to yyy bandwidth. When you want to limit only certain applications you have to know a lot about how in your example the game uses the network.

So the first challenge is to identify game traffic. It might be ports or ip based but you have to find a way to tell the router what "game" traffic really means.

Although the configuration varies a lot from router to router what you need to do is somehow reserve bandwidth for the "game" traffic. The way that tends to work best is to build a rule that restricts all non game traffic. So if you needed to keep 3m for games you would limit other traffic to 7m. In most routers setting the game traffic to 3m does not actually work. Now some routers behind the gui will generate rules that say if you reseve traffic to 3m it instead builds a rule to limit all other traffic to 7m.

This tends to rather complex to configure. So router pretend you can just select some game and give it priority but it tends to not work many time. It might if you get lucky but you generally get best results if you configure all the rules yourself..