Bandwidth Management for Home Networks

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Sharing Your Internet Connection

If you are sharing your internet connection, or plan to, you will probably run out into some problems. There's always this annoying roommate who uses up all bandwidth to download porn using p2p, or a neighbor who browses streaming video sites like Youtube, causing you to lag out in your favorite game or making you unable to chat properly in Skype.

The best solution to this kind of problems is to use a router which is capable of QoS (Quality of Service). Basically, this kind of router controls your traffic (it's called "traffic shaping"), prioritizing certain types of it, and making sure everyone gets a "fair share" of bandwidth.  Of course, if you are the administrator, you can make your share a bigger one ;)

Find out how you can set up a home network without blowing your budget!

Picking the Best Router For Your Network 

The first step is picking the router with the best QoS capabilities. I highly recommend WRT54GL from Linksys. You can install third party Linux-based firmware on it, which gives it some features and flexibility only expensive, commercial devices have. Some ASUS products are good also.

Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL Wireless-G Broadband Router (Compatible with Linux)

Powerful little device with wireless data links and 4 Ethernet port switch. Perfect for your home networking needs.

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Choosing Best Firmware for a WRT54GL Router 

While QoS on default Linksys firmware works pretty well, it lacks important features and flexibility. What's more, according to my personal experience using p2p programs (such as BitTorrent clients) will make your web pages time out because default firmware sets a very low connection limit. Installing any third party firmware from this list fixes the problem. Read more about different WRT54GL router firmware.
Tomato
Highly recommended firmware which takes QoS configuration to the next level. When it comes to setting up traffic priorities, Tomato can do almost anything. Great and easy-to-use web interface. Has a built-in bandwidth monitor.
DD-WRT
Popular firmware that is based on OpenWRT kernel rather than Linksys software. Has many features, especially useful for wireless users. From my experience, it's QoS doesn't work that well though.
OpenWRT
A firmware meant for advanced users, it is said to have one of the best QoS scripts around. It used to have only a command shell, but now some people created X-WRT, a web interface project for OpenWRT.

Configuring the QoS Ruleset of Your Router 

Once you have everything you need for your home network, there's only the configuration left to do. Creating and perfecting your QoS ruleset can take you a few minutes to several days, depending on your experience, needs, and the firmware you chose. However a good setup will save you lots of time and nerves in the future.

For starters you'll want to give higher priority to programs that suffer from insufficient bandwidth: be it games, voice communication or simple web browsing. Give the lowest priority to file downloads and p2p programs. Most custom firmware (such as Tomato) has L7 filters which allow you to simply choose applications to prioritize from a drop-down list. Alternatively, you can prioritize traffic coming from a specific port or IP adress. For example, to prioritize web browsing you will want to give higher priority to port 80 (http).

That's it - enjoy! If you still get lag, tweak your settings by further reducing priority of bandwidth-hungry aplications until you don't have to worry about slow internet . It's all about how you divide and prioritize the web traffic! Your regular web browsing, for example, doesn't need much bandwidth but requires a high priority; and it's the vice versa for big file downloads.

Check the homepages of the according firmware for more information, or visit the Linksys forums.

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