Are there any wireless routers that allow bandwidth monitoring and throttling?

Are there any wireless routers that would allow me to see what clients are hogging up bandwidth and that would let me limit them so that they can't grab it all? Both wifi-wise and internet-wise.

I would be especially interested in one what would let me set a default limit for everyone but certain computers.

Example usage could be to set up a hot-spot at an event with many visitors and prevent some of them from grabbing all the bandwidth by running bittorrent transfers or something like that.

Svish

Posted 2009-07-15T08:16:22.330

Reputation: 27 731

2It'd be great if manufacturers would add these things to routers by default – bobobobo – 2009-08-02T13:30:31.553

What router do you have? Many have "Quality of Service" settings built in to automatically prioritize internet traffic - especially HTTP requests and gaming, while minimizing the priority of P2P traffic. – Breakthrough – 2009-09-10T21:54:24.147

also see Monitoring Bandwidth Across Multiple Systems in a Home Network

– matt wilkie – 2012-11-04T05:16:53.260

Answers

I don't know the specifics of each, but DD-WRT and Tomato are two firmware options I've heard a lot about; they might be able to do something like that.

jtbandes

Posted 2009-07-15T08:16:22.330

Reputation: 8 350

Could you edit your answer with some links to where I can find those two? – Svish – 2009-07-15T17:12:36.947

Awesome. I was just going to ask this same question. – bobobobo – 2009-08-02T13:29:23.923

I'm using Tomato on a WRT54G. Previously I used DD-WRT. I switched to Tomato specifically for bandwidth monitoring. Set up is easy and safe. Just follow the instructions. You can revert to stock firmware if you need to, but you won't want to. http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato

– GloryFish – 2009-07-15T19:28:43.203

By firmware options, do you mean alternative firmware? Is that safe? Can it be reversed if it fails? – Svish – 2009-07-15T09:46:14.343

Yeah, I mean alternatives to the manufacturer's. It's "safe" as long as you're careful; it sounds like reverting is a pretty easy process if you do it right. – jtbandes – 2009-07-15T09:50:26.800

Tomato does it. I'm using it and it seems to work well – Colin Pickard – 2009-07-15T12:50:47.993

tomato and ddwrt are great and allow for monitoring and quality of service for prioritizing packets but they do not allow for throttling. that is, you cannot set maximum available bandwidth for a segment of the network.

if you want to do limit bandwidth, you have to pay for a special version of dd-wrt. see http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/What_is_DD-WRT%3F#Special_Versions for more.

yanokwa

Posted 2009-07-15T08:16:22.330

Reputation: 2 156

My ZyXel VDSL router (P-2802) allows me to prioritize bandwidth by IP/packet-type/port. Maybe this would meet your goals? (I've got mine setup to do so for Skype calls and ssh.)

Stu Thompson

Posted 2009-07-15T08:16:22.330

Reputation: 1 106

Think mine can do something like that as well, but it is not very easy to set up. Probably because I don't really know what all the settings means there :p But also because it is not the most intuitive ui (On those things that is. In general it is ok on that router). – Svish – 2009-07-15T17:13:51.390

Make sure you read the documentation on the aftermarket firmware. There are a few versions of the Linksys WRT54G that are NOT able to be switched back after the DD-WRT conversion.

itprofessionalsgroup

Posted 2009-07-15T08:16:22.330

Reputation: 115

The Billion 740x series allows bandwidth throttling based on the client's IP address. It can be configured under the QoS section of the configuration panel.

Anthony Eden

Posted 2009-07-15T08:16:22.330

Reputation: