Sharing Internet with 7 roommates..

[pocmes]

Hey guys,

I'm living in a house with 7 roommates, some of us are gamers, others are download fanatics and the rest are just general users of the internet. We're currently having issues with the internet.. There's always at least 2 people either Torrenting, downloading movies off Netflix or uploading a video to Facebook / YouTube.

The issue is while they're downloading something the gamers are left with unplayable internet. We currently have Extreme Cable Internet offered by Teksavvy, paying $49/Mo (advertised speeds of 24Mb/s) with a 600Gig cap for 2 months, The cap is fine we generally don't go over it. What would be the best thing to do next year to please everyone?

Should we upgrade the internet? Perhaps something like fiber optic internet? Or buy another internet subsciption and modem / router? Any help will be greatly apreciated.

Thanks in advanced!

 

[RealBeast]

Since you want to "please everyone" bandwidth limits on users probably won't go over well. That would leave you with a need for more bandwidth. Not sure if you can get a second cable connection to one house, so maybe you need to look into what DSL is available. You could setup a second network and put the gamers on one and the downloaders on the other test the latency of the two services with pingtest.net and put the games on the lower latency service.

 

[pocmes]

Since you want to "please everyone" bandwidth limits on users probably won't go over well. That would leave you with a need for more bandwidth. Not sure if you can get a second cable connection to one house, so maybe you need to look into what DSL is available. You could setup a second network and put the gamers on one and the downloaders on the other test the latency of the two services with pingtest.net and put the games on the lower latency service.

Like I said the problem is not really bandwidth since we never come close to reaching the cap, we also don't have a phone line so in order for us to use DSL we'd have to set up a dry loop, which leaves DSL out of the options.. Setting up a second network sounds like an interesting idea I'll look into it thanks. If we put the Downloaders on one network will it really isolate the network traffic from affecting the other router that much???

 

[RealBeast]

I doubt that multiple networks will matter, unless you apply QoS rules in your router, if it supports that or install dd-wrt and use its QoS: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Quality_of_Service With dd-wrt you can apply it by MAC address, unless your addresses are static that would be more reliable.

You should be able to throttle some users. I understand that you have plenty of total download, but the issue is that the heavy downloaders are killing the gamers with their equal priority use, which drives up everyone's latency. Set the downloaders to Standard and the gamers to Premium (and you to Exempt since you are doing all the work getting things running). This will improve the latency for the gamers, which is the key.

 

[pocmes]

Best answer selected by pocmes.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

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