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I have a computer on my home network which I wish to throttle.

I believe I will need to replace my current router but I am unsure what feature set I should be looking for when making my purchase.

Infact, are there different ways of throttling traffic ? If so, what information should I consider when making the choice.

I would preferably like this to work 'out of the box', no 'flashing' required.

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migrated from serverfault.com Sep 1 '11 at 10:59

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7 Answers

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I use a D-Link DGL-4100 gaming router. Has great QoS/bandwidth filtering.

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up vote 7 down vote

If you install Tomato firmware (I'd link if I were allowed, but just Google it) on a Linksys router, you'll get QOS and some throttling features. Not sure if that's exactly what you're looking for (if not, what specifically do you need?).

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That's what I use. It smooths out web access while downloading torrents nicely. – Brian C. Lane May 30 '09 at 7:40
been running tomato for 6 months now. works great. keeps voip running well while torrenting or downloading iso's. also, I like that it keeps download/upload stats. – Brian May 30 '09 at 19:52
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up vote 0 down vote

Do you mean traffic shaping?

Smoothwall does it: http://www.smoothwall.net/products/smoothtraffic2008/

(Try the open source one)

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up vote 0 down vote

You could deploy smoothwall and/or squid proxy on an extra PC.

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up vote 0 down vote

Are you referring to a wireless router or something wired that will sit in a rack? If wireless, I recommend DDWRT. It will run on alot of routers and is very configurable. You can give bandwidth priority to a certain machine or allot a small amount to other machines.

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What is DDWRT? Jack – Jack May 30 '09 at 19:45
ddwrt is similar to tomato; it's replacement firmware for various wifi / home routers (linksys, buffalo, netgear, etc): dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php – Tim Howland May 30 '09 at 21:43
Tim is right. DDWRT is a replacement firmware (linux) for many routers. Flashing it to your router is a bit technical, but the instructions are wonderful. I use it at home and work on every router that I have. Do a Google search for it or check out the wiki dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page – user5195 May 30 '09 at 23:11
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up vote 0 down vote

I use mikrotik RouterOS at most of our sites, has simple queues (based on target address/ip/ip range/packet mark) or full queue tree's for setting up your own QoS systems as well.

Probably the best part about this setup is that I can also use burstable queues, that allow a user to burst above their allowed transfer speed for X amount of time.

Eg: I can assign a queue to a user that limits them to 10Mbps/256Kbps and then set a burstable queue rate of 20Mbps/512Kbps over 60 seconds.

This allows regular web-browsing users etc etc to download at 20Mbps with no problem, soon as a user begins downloading thou, their speed is cut back to the 10Mbps limit.

You can get a preinstalled router from them along with a licence for much less than you'd pay for most decent home-grade routers. (See their sister site http://www.routerboard.com)

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up vote 0 down vote

DD-WRT is also my recommendation. It's an open-source custom firmware for the Linksys WRT series routers, and can be found at dd-wrt.com

I've used it for many years and have been quite impressed by it.

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