Throttling Network Traffic
V-P
State College, PA Member
I have a wireless router setup in my room and my roommate uses it from time to time. This is no problem, but he is a heavy youtube addict and eats up my limited weekly bandwidth which is annoying. I've asked him to stop but I have a feeling he hops on when I'm not here since my bandwidth is shooting up. Anyway, is there anyway I can allow his PC access to my router but throttle it so that he gets lower speeds?
PS it's a Netgear WPN824
PS it's a Netgear WPN824
0
Comments
1) The first way would be through time windows. You create a rule that says this mac address can only access the internet through specific hours of the day. This is rather draconian as it's all or nothing it wouldn't only block youtube. Some routers have the ability to create time windows to restrict specific sites so you could say only allow youtube between 9am-5pm for example. This rule won't limit his bandwidth to youtube only what hours he can use it. Generally speaking this method overall sucks.
2) QoS (Quality of Service) this method allows you to specify that only so much bandwidth is allowed to a given service. So you could restrict his bandwidth to youtube to only 10% this would slow down his overall speed to youtube which would lower your bandwidth overall. Again though depending on your router capabilities this may apply to you as well. The point of QoS though is to try and limit the flow to certain types of traffic to ensure that other types of traffic run smoothly. Most often you'll see people with VOIP setups use QoS to ensure that VOIP connections get the greatest chunk of bandwidth when it's required.
QoS is basically what ISP's use on a large scale when you hear the term throttling.
I looked into Tomato, DD-WRT, and a few other OSes but they don't support my router (not enough RAM maybe?). I have QoS on my router but I'm not exactly sure how to set it up. I'll google that though.