Bandwidth throttling advice

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Hello everyone, i need someone to really help me with this,
I live in a shared house, and we all have access to the wifi.
But the guy in the other room keeps hogging all the bandwidth making it hard for me to even load google sometimes.
He streams sky from the xbox too :@

The router is a Thompson TG585 v7 and it's on o2 internet!

It has no option to limit speeds or anything of the sort, i've read about enabling QoS but the router doesn't have that either.

There is no chance of getting a better router to have more options and the guy has been spoken to, but a few days later it happens again!

Is there any software out there that i can install on my pc to work with the router or control speeds?

Please help if anyone can, it's bugging me!

Thanks guys
 
You can't control the amount of bandwidth another client of the network uses from your PC. Well... besides DoS attacks, but that's a whole different matter.

To help limit his bandwidth hogging, QoS is the way to go. You can specify a line limit on his ethernet connection (EDIT: This will not work if he's using the wireless only!), to prevent him using the majority of the bandwidth easily, but it's only a matter of time before arguments start over the QoS mechanic.

You said that everyone has access to the WiFi, so I'm assuming that everyone with a wireless device uses the WiFi instead of physically cabling into the router. The router you have supports wireless g only, which is a good few years old now and has a maximum theoretical throughput of 54Mbps but with multiple clients using the wireless it's more like 20Mbps to 30Mbps. This will be the bottleneck of your whole infrastructure, unless you have very slow broadband.

If he's using his Xbox wirelessly, he will be saturating the wireless signal with the Sky+ traffic. See if you can get him to run an Ethernet to the router, he would actually see an improvement in the network as well as you, as it allows him to avoid the bottleneck that is the wireless on your network.

That may be a good stop-gap solution
 
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He won't use an ethernet cable as he's done it before, and it's more the case of if i could control it without knowing, not malichously but just enough so it wasn't all going to him when the xbox boots up.

The router is old now but unfortuanely i have no control of upgrading it :(

The router doesnt even have a QoS option which is rather annoying

I guess i have no other options?

Thanks again
 
QoS unfortunately only works on Ethernet on most routers, as QoS over the wireless uses a large amount of CPU time on the router, and is typically an enterprise feature. So if he's only using wireless, even QoS won't stop him.

The best idea would be to upgrade the router to a wireless N compatible version, which would provide more bandwidth to the clients of the network. But I can't quite remember if Xbox's support wireless N so that may be of no benefit. Plus you have no control over upgrading it anyway.

As far as I can tell you're unfortunately out of options :(
 
No way of upgrading router as landlord wont do it. :(
I know his computer is plugged into the router by ethernet. I just think the router is too old to do anything! Darn it!!
 
QoS won't help, only very high end routers or ones with custom FW can traffic shape and then it will be more complicated with the wireless issue too.
 
QoS won't help, only very high end routers or ones with custom FW can traffic shape and then it will be more complicated with the wireless issue too.

I don't really understand why wifi adds any complication to qos. Home broadband is far slower than wifi so the few qos solutions available on routers throttle the wan, wifi/ethernet makes no difference.

O.P. Get another router, doesn't matter if you use an old pc (the most powerful option) or a router running custom firmware (tomato has the best qos - and better gui for it - than dd-wrt, however both are options) it's the only solution. That is assuming replacing the flatmate isn't an option :)

The trusty 54gl can be found dirt cheap, RT-N16 would be the next logical choice (there are similarly priced netgears with the same cpu but half the ram which really matter for qos) up to the powerhouse that is the RT-N66U which is overkill if you don't know what you're doing but will last for the next 5 yeas at minimum :). Those are all cable routers meaning you need a modem. You can set the current thompson to bridged but it's painful.

The best all in one solution is the DSL-N55U, a slower dsl version of the RT-N66U. Interesting this about these two routers is they use a lot of the tomato code in the official firmware and have a really nice gui for people with no qos knowledge.

The final thing to note is you don't have to replace the thompson. You could simply run a cable from it to the wan port of a cable router and disable it's wifi then use the tomato router for qos (everyone would connect to it instead). Would require a bit of tinkering, complicating things slightly, but very doable - consider it a last resort.
 
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