How can I log bandwidth used and throttle speeds on Windows home network?

Question

I am researching a mobile satellite internet solution (I know it's terrible, I have my reasons). The plans are slow and they have harsh bandwidth limits. I'm a single user that is spoiled by home and office broadband. I need to perform two tasks before I can decide on the satellite service:

1. Perform my daily work using the speeds I'm likely to experience with the satellite system: 700Kbps UP, 100Kbps DOWN with 1,500ms latency
2. Determine how much data I actually use through the day (categorized by application/domain would be a bonus)

I suspect (and hope) that a proxy server running on my home computer would be able to assist me with both of the two above tasks. However my initial googling is confusing me with so many options and terms I'm unfamiliar with.

If a proxy is the way to go, can you please suggest an appropriate application that I can install on Windows? If a proxy is not the best approach, what would you suggest?

Answer 1

Here are several products that can control bandwidth and latency :

Charles Web Debugging Proxy (shareware $50, trial version fully functional)
The bandwidth may be throttled to any arbitrary bytes per second, and the latency to any arbitrary number of milliseconds.

Network Simulator (free)
Can define rules for traffic control, regarding bandwidth, latency, and even packet loss rate.

Fiddler web debugging proxy (free)
This wonderful monitoring and development tool can also simulate slow connections using the Connection Simulator add-on. For more info see this article.

Answer 2

Net Limiter would probably do what you wanted. It will certainly chart how much data you use, both overall and by application, and you can filter the speed of individual applications. I honestly don't know if it would properly simulate a slow connection or not, but you would get a close approximation.

A proxy server could do what you wanted too, however I don't have any experience with a locally installed proxy that does what you want.

What router/edge network device are you currently using? Most mid range and onwards have some form of speed limiting included. Certainly routers that offer Guest Wifi will usually offer some form of throttling, connect over a throttled guest network and see how you get on.

Answer 3

You can use WANem to simulate a low-latency, limited-bandwidth connection. It can be used as a LiveCD app on some computer in your network and then you adjust the routes on your windows PC to go through it. You could probably run it as a VM and route your traffic through the virtual NIC.

Check out the documentation link on their site and see the examples in their PDF but there is a nice web interface you access to adjust all parameters you'd like including Bandwidth, Delay time (ms), Jitter (ms), Packet Loss, Duplication, Reordering, Corruption, etc.

The PDF documentation also describes how to get packets routed through your WANem environment under Windows and Linux. You can also find further examples on business networks in the wild such as this one http://openmaniak.com/wanem_network.php.