Limiting Speed to a particular user - BT Broadband

Evening all,
Just wondering if anyone can suggest whether it's possible to limit a particular person on a BT Broadband connection - a little background: I'm sharing with a couple other people at the moment, one of which seems to be downloading at all times, hogging the majority of our bandwidth. Is there any way to limit their download speed without cutting them off entirely? We're supposed to be getting ~19mbps, and I'm getting a total of 1 at the moment. I have full access to the router, a homehub 3, if that helps?

Thanks in advance!
Stuart.

You need to replace the HH3 with a router which allows you to limit bandwidth on a per port or IP address basis. Some TPLink routers can do this. Or you could chat to the person hogging the bandwidth and come to some arrangement.

Unfortunately we don't have the best relationship with the person in question, which is why we're moving out at the end of February. It's just frustrating to know that it's next to impossible to play anything online because he's constantly using up the majority of our bandwidth. Might see if I can sneak in there at some point and put a limit on the software itself.

Cheers Bats.

Depends how he is hogging. Torrenting can be a pain as it saturates the upload, which causes problems for the download, and everyone in general. I had someone who was doing this consistently on a wired connection a while ago (connected to a Draytek router) and on those, you can rate limit each ethernet port, both in and out independently, so I tweaked his port on the "in" side only (which is his upload), lowering to 1KB / second. Yup, that fixed everyone's issues, and still allowed him to browse (download) at a reasonable speed.

You could get an alternative access point (if he's using wireless) that supports limiting and make him use that instead (wired into the home hub) - but they are always going to match on IP address (poor) or client MAC address (also poor, as they can be changed to anything, unless of course, you lock down the AP to only allow his client MAC to associate).

Or, alternatively, you can buy a managed ethernet switch like I got myself a while ago (a netgear prosafe plus 5 port gigabit) - these are surprisingly nifty as they allow you to rate limit each ethernet port (like the DrayTek I spoke of earlier) but without all the additional wireless/broadband modem/router integration (they are simply a switch). Then plug a standard AP into the rate limited port on that, linking it back to the home hub, lock him to that AP, job done.

PS - yeah, it seems like the home hub 3 you have can't do what you are wanting: https://community.bt.com/t5/Connected-Devices-Other/...

Fairly certain he's torrenting - certainly the port all the connections are coming into is heavily linked with Transmission. We actually have a Home Hub 5, but as far as I can tell it has the same limitations as the 3,so no luck there. Might just have to see if I can ban his MAC address from the network temporarily each time I want to play.

Most torrenting software allows for rate limiting of traffic for this reason. Politely ask him if he would enable it, so as to not flood the connection.

Yeah, and if that doesn't work, kick him off.

Torrent uploads are no problem at all if you limit the upload right down to 1Kbps

My point is that most connections are asymmetric in terms of speed, and a saturated upload will stall all downloads (slow browsing, page timeouts etc). So opting for 1 KB/sec upload (yeah, I went overboard when I did it, but his relentless torrenting was highly irritating) solved both of these problems whilst still "mostly" allowing him to download normally (as downloading would normally mean lots of small TCP ack packets could still be sent at a reasonable rate back to peers, but not at a fast enough rate to ever enable the peer to send pay-load TCP acks back to him at a rate which would saturate the download).

It was a quick fix, and it mostly worked.

Edited by deleted (Tue 29-Dec-15 15:14:55)