Bandwith Throttling

I'm looking for some freeware bandwith throttling tools since I'm now being forced to share my DSL connection with my dead beat family. I only have a 3.0mbit line so its not like I have alot of bandwith to spare and I want to limit their bandwith so it doesn't interfer with my online activities. Anyone know of any? I've done a google search and I can't find any free ones.

As far as free software goes I have not found anything. It's possible some kind of NAT software setup might do this for you if it had some bandwidth throttle features but that's just guess. Surely there is something out there though. Check out sourceforge.net and freshmeat.net for possible open-source options.

I've read routers can handle bandwidth throttling. This IMO would be the best option. You will have to look up the documentation for your router.

I'm pretty sure my linksys router doesn't support bandwith throttling.

If you have access to their computers just set the bandwidth on the individual machine. There are lots of free network setting tweak programs running around. Doing it from the router would require going to their website support or forum and finding an answer because I haven't a clue how to do it.

bandwidth throttling in a home router is just about unheard of unless there's wireless access involved. However some routers might honor the QoS protocol and you could give yourself a higher priority than the rest of your family. I don't know much about how to set that up though.

On further investigation, if you can spare an old box or find a cheap one to buy, you might set it up as a proxy. There are proxy apps out there that can limit bandwidth per user. You would then have to set the proxy settings on each of your family members computers to autologin as a specific user. Found CCProxy - Proxy Server Software for Windows at http://www.youngzsoft.net/ccproxy/

There are a few things you can try (for free - or close to it).

If you have an old PC (with two network cards) laying around you can try out m0n0wall. It's a bootable BSD iso that's designed specifically to 'route' traffic. You can apply your own 'traffic shaping' rules via a web interface.

If you're more adventurous - you can 'mimic' the m0n0wall functionality on any fairly recent FreeBSD installation using ipfw and dummynet (rules, pipes, queues, etc).


Depending on the router in question - there should be *some* models that provide rudimentary 'traffic shaping' (with native or hacked firmware). Don't quote me on that - just a guess. I know the DLink DGL4100/DGL4300 'gaming' router has basic traffic shaping. I've *read* that some Linksys models do as well (especially now that VoIP has become so popular).

In any case - I'm not sure you can throttle bandwidth per MAC address via the Linksys / DLink method - but it might be worth spending some time on Google to find out.

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Now that I've rambled on for quite long enough - I'm sure there are many more potential solutions out there (that don't necessarily involve buying new hardware).

I have a 2Mb connection which I share with my family, I've noticed SL hardly ever uses more than 1/8 of the bandwidth ( and adjusting the bw slider in SL prefs seems to do diddly squat ). I'm sure SL used to send faster than 30k/s, maybe LL have throttled their servers recently to cope with the 5000 concurrent users ? ( maybe this is a reason why it lags more these days )