Restricting bandwidth

[thecremeegg]

Right, at home we have slow broadband and whenever someone else goes on youtube etc my game pings shoot through the roof.

Is there anyway I can restrict other users to a certain amount of bandwidth so that I can keep a good amount free for gaming?

 

[TheRedZealot]

I dont mean to hi-jack the thread or anything but how much bandwidth does MSN and youtube take up at once?

 

[TrX]

It's not necessarily the bandwidth, it's the change in latency caused by the web traffic.

You could use an open source firewall with built in traffic shaping to not reduce the usable bandwidth of the others, but to always prioritize gaming packets to be sent first.

pfsense is a good place to start, you will need an old spare box with 2 network cards tho.
I should imagine there are some routers that will do this too, but pfsense is what I use for quick home setups.