Data caps, Bandwidth monitoring, and more questions.

[bschultz]

My ISP's Data cap is only 100 gigabytes a month. Our household can blow through that pretty quickly. I have questions.

Is there a router that will (or will dd-wrt) allow me to monitor bandwidth usage on a per device basis?
If so is it possible to set data/download caps for individual devices accessing the router?

As in once they reach their daily/weekly/monthly download cap that I set, the router cuts the devices network connection off.

If not per device what about an ip range? As in capping the data usage of a netflix connection.

Is there any router or custom firmwear that can do this? I didnt have much luck trying to google for my answer because I guess its a pretty specific question.

Thank you for any help offered!

 

[JBark]

I don't think DD-WRT has quite the features you are looking for when it comes to this. I might be able to do it, but it's probably some stupidly complex command line config that works like crap anyway.

However, I bet something like pfSense can do what you want, probably just have to setup the squid proxy and it has all sorts of bandwidth monitoring/shaping options.

I not all that familiar with pfSense myself, though, so I can't say for sure. I know more than a few guys that post here are huge pfSense fans, so they can probably confirm.

 

[Godmachine]

I doubt there is a consumer level router that can do what you want , either you'll have to step up to something business class or run your own setup with pfSense which I'm sure can do this.

Even the better consumer level routers can only monitor bandwidth with a counter and halt the connection once it reaches an overall limit for the month which is no help to you.

Any chance you could just pay for more bandwidth per month? Or upgrade to a higher speed tier which with most ISPs comes with a greater bandwidth cap?

 

[bschultz]

any idea on a business router that could pull this off? Im not reall the scripting/codeing type...
unless anything that could do this is hundreds of dollars...

 

[goalied00d]

Pfsense can do this pretty easily without any scripting on your part, and compared to a business router/switch with these features, it will be considerably less expensive . There is a built in captive portal function that will let you limit bandwidth by ip, or mac address. Bandwidthd will let you graph bandwidth by device, and is installed through the browser gui. You could graph bandwidth with other tools like prtg

You can get a used tower or rackmount server off ebay with dual cores(x64), dual nics, and 4gb of ram for under 100 bucks on ebay that would be more than enough for a home network.

 

[bschultz]

So I'm realizing that I used the wrong term in my first post. When I said I want to set up bandwidth caps... What I actually meant was that I want to set up download/data caps on a per device basis. Is this still possible?

 

[kurabii]

tomato can monitor data cant it? I mean most tethering software out there for even android monitors data provided so you can cap your friends hahaha

If that fails pfsense works great. single household, my dog isnt using my internet (-_-)

 

[bschultz]

Again I'm not really looking to cap bandwidth speeds on any of the connections. I just want to be able to cap data when it hits say 2 gigabytes per device in 24 hours. I've been searching all morning and other then people saying its possible. I haven't found a single tutorial, mod, firmware, website... nothing.

 

[CEpeep]

Another vote for pfSense. It can do everything you are asking. We use it to cap/monitor bandwidth for hundreds of virtual hosts, among loads of other things. You can have rules based on bandwidth, IP ranges, packet type, etc. Complex activities may require some knowledge of FreeBSD (console and scripting), but you can do most tasks through the Web UI.

If you just want to monitor, you can easily configure MRTG on DD-WRT to generate graphs for each host, but AFAIK there's no easy way to use that data to automatically filter or block connections.