I currently have 5 pc's (2 wired, 3 wireless) on my router and I was wondering if there was a software I could intstal on all/one PC to limit/allocate my Internet bandwidth on a per PC basis so that I could split my 5 Megabit cable connection five ways. Is this possible to do or is there a software that can regulate bandwidth on a PC so one PC does not hog all the bandwidth???
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How to limit bandwidth per PC on network?
- Thread starter Koslov
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I wouldn't put my faith in anything software driven on a PC as opposed to hardware driven (switch, router, UTM, etc.) system. If your router supports third-party firmware (DD-WRT, Tomato, or OpenWRT) you can definitely set up Quality of Service to give your port the highest priority for bandwidth and artificially limiting other ports and devices to much lower max speeds. Limiting the wireless is a little bit more difficult. Although you could force the router to only broadcast in 802.11b mode (11Mbps max) and the speed decreases quite fast in a home environment through walls. There are further tweaks you can make but only once we know the router model you have.
RocketTech
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pfSense on a roll today- use pfSense and Dummynet configuration to split the bandwidth. QoS may be a better option. What is the desired end result? What do you hope to accomplish by splitting bandwidth?
WRT160Nv3
QoS isn't an option. It's not what I need. Basically I want to set a maximum download/upload speed per IP address on my network. I think DD-WRT does it but you need to use the "special" $20 version with bandwidth limiting options. However I'm not sure if that version supports my router. Tomato USB might.
Hmmm. Not to my knowledge you don't have to pay for that feature. Didn't realize DD-WRT even made a pay-for version lol.
Works just fine for me.
EDIT: Scratch what I had. Do you have a box you could use as a firewall? Second NIC on a PC that's always running?
RocketTech
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Like I posted above, pfSense with DummyNet (built-in) would give you exactly what you are asking for, but it could bite you in the butt in unexpected ways, especially as you intend to deploy it. Strictly speaking, speeding any and all packets increases overall network efficiency. Limiting bandwidth only when contention exists is more efficient- traffic is kept at max speed until other traffic (at the same time) causes contention, which would then enforce speed limits.
If you are trying to split a connection fairly, I would actually do something like a HFSC Queue across interfaces to allow full speed when no contention exists, then throttling interfaces down as contention builds until the minimum of 1Mb/ interface is reached.
If you are trying to split a connection fairly, I would actually do something like a HFSC Queue across interfaces to allow full speed when no contention exists, then throttling interfaces down as contention builds until the minimum of 1Mb/ interface is reached.