Student house internet issues

Mason-

Mason-

Mason-

Soldato
Joined
18 Jun 2010
Posts
6,804
Location
Essex
Currently sharing a house with 6 other people on one ADSL connection, the sync speeds are 18.8mbps down and 888kbps up. The internet is always bad, tbh it's to be expected in a house with this many people and also some people like to watch iPlayer or what not and that's totally reasonable to want to do so, however having looked at the usage data in my routers usage page (I brought my own router up as the supplied one is crap, it's a Netgear DGND3000v2) what startled me the most was the amount of upload that is taking place.



I don't know how much most people upload but that's averaging over 100MB per person per day... surely that's too much?

I suspect someone is torrenting without saying so but it's hard to prove, is there anyway I can block torrenting, or be able to see which IPs are downloading/uploading?

I've tried banning keywords and have banned the following:
torrent
tracker
thepiratebay
d1:ad2 (I read somewhere this is meant to block people connecting via DHT Network)

any help would be great, thanks.

Currently I've been trying to download a game on steam and it's trundling along at 125KB/s which by my calculations is 1Mbps, this is awful.
 
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The upload doesn't seem that excessive. It certainly isn't maxing out your available upstream bandwidth. It my maths is correct the total of 1,711 MBytes from yesterday is roughly 160 kbps.

Does the router have QoS features, and are they switched on?

Why are you trying to download large files during the day on a congested connection? I'd guess that your housemates are cursing you for taking up bandwidth that could more usefully be used for real-time applications.
 
I rarely download at all, it's just as I built a new PC today, I wanted to download 1 game to play. Regardless, me using up 1mbps out of 10+ hardly hogging the line I'm not a heavy downloader either I mostly play games and program on my computer. It does have QoS but there's not much to it, giving certain MAC addresses priority and some ports priority but that's about it. And as for them cursing me, not really 1's asleep 4 are in the living room and the others playing Dota :P
 
100 MB is nothing. That's probably just ACKs for download for the most part. If people were torrenting, there would probably be a lot more upload being used.

I don't know if that router allows you to see active connections, but you'd get a pretty good idea if a torrent client was running from the large numbers of connections to various different IP addresses. You can also check if there are loads of open ports configured via UPNP.
 
Maybe I should have include a suitable emoticon after the 'cursing' sentence? It certainly wasn't intended as a serious dig.

The line may be syncing at 18.8Mbps, but what's the actual throughput? You did 33,500MB yesterday, that's only 3Mbps on average. Even if you take out the 18 hours a day an average student sleeps you're only managing 12Mbps.
 
I have seen 15 Mbps before, and it's fine I'm just defending my case because I don't want to come across as someone who downloads all the time, all I really play is CS:S and dota, so I don't really download new games often.
 
I'm assuming most people are on wireless? You can use wireshark with an adapter that supports promiscuous mode to snoop on everyone and find out what traffic is going where and what type of traffic it is.

As said previously, the upload looks very reasonable versus the amount that is downloaded.
 
Upload seems fine, I think you're worrying too much over that.

As for download and latency, that's quite normal when you're in a house with that many students... are there no fibre packages avaliable?
 
Orcvader said:
Upload seems fine, I think you're worrying too much over that.

As for download and latency, that's quite normal when you're in a house with that many students... are there no fibre packages avaliable?
Click to expand...

In Hull, there is only one ADSL company that has a monopoly because they didn't join BT back whenever all the local phone companies merged, and so there is only one provider who is only just rolling out fibre, not in our area though.
 
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