Seriously Confused. Wireless Internet Problem...

[JinKazama]

Okay, so here is the skinny. My room is in the basement, while my access point is two floors up. Here is the dilemna...

Now 50% of the time everything is gravy. I enjoy max transfer rates of 2-300 kb/s whiich is fine. The other 50% of the time however, I get nothing 10-20 kb/s. Now what I have deduced is that these times coincide with then my brother is downloading crap (Torrents). I have verified my theory by turning off the torrents and checking my download speed. All through out this my displayed signal strength is 54.0 Mbps.

What exactly is going on here? And what can you suggest for me to fix this problem? Should I get a new Wireless router? I am currently using my stock wireless router supplied by Bell Sympatico. And my laptop is outfitted with Netgear wireless card.

 

[Guest]

I don't think there's any way you can throttle your brother (not literally, hopefully) using domestic networking equipment. You might consider whether wireless is the best option for your layout and have a look at mains-borne networking using plug adapters (generically called Homeplug).

 

[JinKazama]

Well as I said, this problem only arises about 50% of the time. There must be a way to divy up the bandwidth between the two computers connected to it.

 

[jankyscoes]

The easiest way is to ask your brother to limit his upload and download speeds in his torrent program. That way his torrents arent hogging all the bandwidth.

 

[JinKazama]

is there anything that I can use to divy the bandwidth evenly?

 

[jeb1517]

The really really expensive routers have a feature where you can throttle bandwidth for individual programs. But, these routers are hundreds of dollars. Here's the good news...new firmware for old routers lets them do the same thing. Check out this article.
http://lifehacker.com/software/router/hack-attack-turn-your-60-router-into-a-600-router-178132.php
I'm not sure what router you have but maybe there's a firmware for yours that does the same thing.