Roommate using bandwidth

[skrcer1]

Every time my roommate is home the internet is slowed down to almost unusable speeds, I assume hes downloading whenever he is home.

What are my options to deal with this? How can I limit bandwidth to his laptop?

Thanks

 

[The Paladin]

depends on the router, most Netgear bios routers you can simply Goto administration, what's connected to your router, the select the laptop and lower the bandwidth priority usage from high (usually default) to medium and/or set your pc to highest priority.
other than setting QOS under Lan configuration. should permit you to play games while he's downloading/video watching without really affecting his stuff


ps: not responsible for the fights it may ensure between the two of you. 😛

 

[skrcer1]

Thanks for your reply, I do not have a bandwidth priority section in my router settings but I do have QoS. One of my friends was over and set up the QoS cause he knows a bit of networking and it worked but I had to reset the router and it wiped everything, I'm hoping someone here can help me set it up again after which I will back it up so I have it saved.

My friend can't do it anymore since he's abroad on a trip for a few months...

If I post screen shots of the router screen would that help?

 

[The Paladin]

what model of router is it ?

 

[skrcer1]

It is a T&W T-128 with broadcom firmware

 

[The Paladin]

found many manuals for it all in foreign language to the ones I speak (English French Spanish). but I could see a menu listed in a video on YouTube regarding adsl configs, and I suggest looking into the advanced settings.. for QOS, normally you set an IP and set priority to that IP, do not forget to press SAVE or else the information is lost after a reboot.

 

[skrcer1]

I see the QoS option, there is just so many other parameters in the classification page I tried to put in a couple and test it with my PC to see that it works and none of the configurations that I tried worked.

For example: Class interface, Ether type, Class queue, Protocol, Classification Results.. and many of them have a drop down menu with what looks like gibberish

 

[The Paladin]

can you screen capture that page ?

 

[skrcer1]

 

[bill001g]

I don't even know why routers like this even have DSCP settings. This are completely worthless in a device that is used to provide home/small business connection to the internet.

All these packet markings are stripped off as soon as they get to the ISP. They actually have no standard meaning and even if they did everyone would just set all their traffic to be highest priority to get better performance than their neighbors.

The only part that has any value is the last part if you can match ip and then set it to some rate.

Still this likely will not solve your problem. This router can only limiting traffic being sent from your house....ie upload. It is much more likely from your description that you are exceeding your download rates. You need very special routers to limit download rates and they do not really work all that well. The ISP is actually in control of data send and if they were to delete a packet and send something else your router can not after it receives the packet that it does not like decide to discard that one instead and magically recreate the one the ISP discarded.

 

[skrcer1]

Is it better to use MAC address or IP or both? I tried just using the MAC Address with no avail.

As I mentioned in my earlier post a friend of mine familiar with networking was able to configure it; we put in 1500 Kbit/s for the test with my MAC address (I don't remember if he used IP also) and we checked it on speedtest.net and it worked. I lost the configuration after I needed to reset my router though.

Its also all pretty unintuitive because after you create a rule you cannot go back and edit it, either enable, disable or delete...

 

[bill001g]

generally doesn't matter a mac or ip both pretty much identify the machine unless the ip would change for some reason.

You still can not limited download rates with your router it only limits upload rates

 

[skrcer1]

When my friend set it up there was a total throttle (we confirmed through speed test.net and he was doing it through teamviewer at which point he was no longer able to control my PC cause of the lag) increased ping, download and upload speeds.

I will test again whilst leaving the parameters all empty except MAC address, IP and rate limit.

If it doesn't work are there any other ways you can recommend to limit my roommates download speeds?

 

[bill001g]

Buy a different router that have the ability to limit download traffic....it will not stop something like torrent though

 

[skrcer1]

So you you telling me there is no fix for this?

I tried leaving the parameter blank with no success to even upload speed, I think there is definitely something missing.

 

[bill001g]

Talk to the roommate. All QoS does is enforce a agreement. You would not have a problem if he would limit his download with options on his machine.

Still you can't expect boxes you get from a ISP to have advanced features, you are lucky it has the basic QoS it does.