Thread: Traffic Shaping router advice

I have a lot of guests come through my place and recently they've been downloading like crazy and put me over my quota. I've never really had this problem before, so never worried about it, but Spero2 mentioned a traffic shaping router... does anyone know a good brand/model? I know sfa about networking, and could use some advice Ideally I would just like to put a quota on any devices that aren't my own, but speed caps would be good too.

The thing you're looking for is quality of service, QoS.

I think it's available in most decent routers these days.


Comparative performance of the QoS is a completely different matter, I don't use it so I can't say what's good.

Hmm, well my current router's manual mentions QoS:
ATM QoS: Select the type of Quality of Service for this Virtual Circuit. The ATM QoS types include
CBR (Constant Bit Rate), rtVBR (Real Time Variable Bit Rate), nrtVBR (Non Real Time Variable Bit
Rate) and UBR (Unspecified Bit Rate). These types of QoS are all controlled by the parameters
specified below, including PCR, SCR and MBS.

Select CBR to specify fixed (always-on) bandwidth for voice or data traffic. Select UBR for applications
that are non-time sensitive, such as e-mail. Select VBR for burst traffic applications and those that
share bandwidth with other applications.

That means I don't need a new router, right?

Depends, the router's that I've used to do this have generally had some way of specifically throttling data.


ATM QoS I think refers to putting a priority tag on the outbound traffic. But no idea.