[Technical] A "real" world problem for consideration

[Kevork Krozian]

Hi folks,

      In one of my other areas of interest I provide accommodation to overseas students around a major university. 
One of these properties has an Optus cable modem internet link shared by 4 workstations through a switching router eg. Netgear or similar.

  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.  

  The solution needs to be  two  ( maybe three ) fold:

                     1. Bandwidth management -- each user gets one quarter of available bandwidth
                     2. Download usage management -- each user gets no more than one quarter of the limit for the month. User can check balance.
                     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.

   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.
   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. 

   So, any thoughts out there from my esteemed colleagues ??

Regards



Kevork Krozian
IT Manager , Forest Hill College
k.krozian at fhc.vic.edu.au
http://www.fhc.vic.edu.au
Mobile: 0419 356 034