Right, long shot here, not sure if there is a soloution or not, but its worth an ask.

Now I have moved out of my home, I am now sharing a house with 4 people, all sharing a single broadband connection, obviously when more than 2 people are using the connection my pings suffer, is there anyway I can shape the bandwidth so we all recieve a portion of it, rather than 1 person taking the loins share at certain points?.

Dan,

how fast is your connection? I share a 2mbps connection with 3-5 other people and my pings never take a hit.

You can use netlimiter to slow specific applications down but good luck getting them to use it :P

1mb , works fine most of the time, but I can see problems occuring in the future, especially if I have an "important" race i.e. ESL.

Dan,

That should be plenty of bandwidth unless everyone is downloading at once.

Quote from danowat :

1mb , works fine most of the time, but I can see problems occuring in the future, especially if I have an "important" race i.e. ESL.

Dan,

If there is 4 of you, why not upgrade to max 8mb. I'm with f2s.com and although my exchange doesn't support 8mb i'm getting downloads of around 5-6mb. f2s, 8mb, £15/month.

Yeah, its an option, if it becomes a problem I will have to suggest it to the landlord.

Dan,

Having said that, with BT in charge, who knows what could happen to your connection, I've still got "outage problems" that should have been resolved on Monday!!

With regards to F2S, one of our new customers was with them and getting poor service. We called to get 2 MAC codes (ISP migration codes for the non-techies), and spent a total of 4 hours on hold. I'm sure they're nice if you dont need "support", but as soon as you do, then be prepared to wait.

Currently we're advising Zen, but since they've brought in capping we've suggested that all our customers move to Eclipse - who we've had good experiences with. Alternatively, I personally use one of the telewest bundle deals. Very nice and cost effective. No caps either.

Regarding bandwidth shaping, most consumer routers can do this today; although not always very well. You'll usually find it under "QOS".

Edt: Regarding BT, any *DSL line depends on them. You have no idea how much trouble they cause sometimes.

You've hit the nail on the head there!!!
Service so far has been very good indeed, but trying to get tech support is a bit of a mare!!! I gave up on the telephone yesterday trying to get answers to my "outage problem" and now using the email method, so lets see.........

I used Eclipse when I was at home, they were/are very good, I would have them again if I could.

Dan,

Just to bitch about BT a little, what really worries me is that they dont seem to know where their fibres start and stop. We're putting in a nice little fibre line for a customer, but it wasnt until 2 weeks before hand that BT realised that there wasnt any Fibre in that area - this means an additional 1.5K of cost to the customer.

Dan, if you let us know how the internet access is setup, whether its through ICS, a dedicated hardware device, a linux box doing the routing, etc., we might beable to advise on a better way around your problem The ultimate would be a bigger pipe though

We are all using Wi-Fi, running through a Netgear DG834GT router.

Dan,

Since my earlier post, i've been on to BT, who have NO idea what i'm asking for and get put through to an 0800 number which is a dead end!!!
So BT don't want to know, so tried F2S and they cut me off after an hour of on hold!!! WTFillepall

Andrew


EDIT

Dan, do you have any settings other than the standard ones in your router (I have the same)

Quote from danowat :

We are all using Wi-Fi, running through a Netgear DG834GT router.

Dan,

Well if you need a 3 or 4 mile length of CAT cable, I could sneak in and stall a hardwire connection for you You could use QOS but then you would have to set this in each PC.

Personally, I would speak to the 4 people, and goto bigger broadband. Plunet are doing 8mb Broadband for 21.99, but its on a 20:1 contention. 22 / 4 = £5.50 per month each for 8mb, now thats cost effective

I've seen some routers have 'throttling', where you can specify a minimum bandwidth to certain LAN IP addresses, but that means new hardware!
i.e. 10% for PC1, 20% for PC2, rest shared between PC1, PC2, PC3 & PC4