[DannyQ]

Hi this is going to sound really tight but its REALLY starting to get on my nerves.

I live in a shared house and I pay for the Internet connection. Just recently my housemates have found the joys of broadband and started to play online on the Wii / 360 and my other housemate has a laptop which he's connected via wireless.

The dude with the laptop has installed Limewire and several other P2P software and it seems between the hours of 6pm to midnight my computer grinds to halt when browsing the web or playing online on the Xbox360. No doubt downloading porn and CAM's

I have 8Mb connection with an XMicro 11b Wireless Router. I would of thought that the 8Mb should be more than enough for everyone but clearly that’s not the case. I tested my broadband speed and it was nowhere near the 8Mb that Virgin bills me for

I could change my broadband package but that would cost more money and I’m only getting a fraction of what I pay for at the moment anyway. My question is can i limit the amount of wireless bandwidth allocated on my wireless network this way everyone can use and i wont be effect too much. I've read the router manual and I could not find anything at all and i want to try and avoid installing software on my housemate laptop

Any ideas ..... ?

[DannyQ]

EMAIL I RECEIVED FROM A FRIEND

1) Broadband speeds are rarely what they claim to be. There will be a top limit of 8Mbps (and that's only downstream, not upstream) and then it gets lower if you're further from an exchange. It's actually not the wireless part (which is just the bit in your house) which is slowing you down, it's the ADSL/Cable line that you're using to access the internet which is just full up, and rightly you should be unhappy that your flatmate does this.

2) X-Micro WLAN 11b routers used to have a massive security flaw, which lets anyone login from outside and hack your network: http://www.juniper.net/security/auto/vulnerabilities/vuln10095.html
this may be fixed by now, but maybe not.

3) Looking at the manual I don't think this router is able to rate-limit individual traffic types. There is a big knob, however, which turns off all of a particular type of traffic :-) It's under "Access" then "Filter" and then "Protocol Filters". Unfortunately Limewire will get around this by hopping about looking for a port that isn't blocked and if it can't find one it'll just turn into HTTP port 80, which is the same as web traffic and will stop web browsing altogether.


Conclusions:
- Ditch the X-Micro if it has that security issue, maybe ask for your money back as it's not fit for purpose.
- Talk nicely to your mate and ask him to rate-limit his traffic from Limewire itself. He doesn't do it all day, so perhaps he's deliberately trying to be nice already. If he complains, get him to pay the bill. If he won't, do a wee in his milk while he's out.
- Maybe ask on the forums for a router which can rate-limit traffic, but this will just end up a game of cat-and-mouse as he asks on forums about how to avoid rate-limiting, and then you'll have a small-scale version of the game that ISPs play all day with their customers.

Good luck!

Ben

[zx10guy]

If you're willing to put some money in to this, you can buy a managed switch which supports QoS and do bandwidth limiting on the port your roommate is plugged in to or via IP.