Yes Kevork, it is an interesting dilemma how best to divide up the Internet
commons by dishing out small portions at a time or using straws to eat.<br><br>I think your proposal to cap bandwidth is easy enough to do with your setup .. I like the idea of giving each user slice of the available bandwidth. At a stab, a third should be fine as they probably wont notice the drop in performance when the fourth user jumps online as they are used to hopping about on one leg. You can fine tune this by further capping their collective bandwidth if the cable modem link gets close to its limit (perhaps your plan already does this). It should also be easy enough to track, tally and report usage by IP.
<br><br>Regards Roland<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 21/04/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Kevork Krozian</b> <<a href="mailto:Kroset@novell1.fhc.vic.edu.au">Kroset@novell1.fhc.vic.edu.au</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Hi folks,<br><br> In one of my other areas of interest I provide accommodation to overseas students around a major university.
<br>One of these properties has an Optus cable modem internet link shared by 4 workstations through a switching router eg. Netgear or similar.<br><br> Recently there has been a fair amount of tension between the students playing the blame game of accusing each other of slowing down the internet link or downloading more than their fair share ( 12GB link midday to midnight, 3 GB each if all is fair --- 20GB midnight to midday, 5 GB each if the daytime limit is not breached ) for the month.
<br><br> The solution needs to be two ( maybe three ) fold:<br><br> 1. Bandwidth management -- each user gets one quarter of available bandwidth<br> 2. Download usage management -- each user gets no more than one quarter of the limit for the month. User can check balance.
<br> 3. Not be so expensive to setup and maintain , that it makes the solution more expensive than setting up individual ADSL lines for each student.<br><br> There is a linux solution -- between cable modema and switching router -- ( no need for anything higher than a PIII to do the job ) using Squid to throttle bandwidth but this may be a hard limit eg. 50Kbps rather than " fetch current bandwidth, divide by four , update bandwidth allowed for each " . Any gateway running a Windows platform solution will call for a high end machine and that alone makes any solution prohibitive. Or , divide available bandwidth by number of users rather than by 4 as there may be bandwidth wasted if not everyone is on the network.
<br> There is the issue of the rapidly fluctuating throughput measured eg. It is not unusual for a machine at home on a small network to record anything from 100Kbps to 400 Kbps during a short period depending what else is happening.
<br><br> So, any thoughts out there from my esteemed colleagues ??<br><br>Regards<br><br><br><br>Kevork Krozian<br>IT Manager , Forest Hill College<br><a href="mailto:k.krozian@fhc.vic.edu.au">k.krozian@fhc.vic.edu.au</a>
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