|
As the internet has become more popular and more widely used among families, the internet connection is normally shared among several computers using a network setup. This way you do not have to pay for several internet connections and have many different phone lines, you can keep the one phone line (or cable if you have a cable internet connection plan) and keep the costs and bills down. Usually when you purchase an internet plan the modem you get with the package will have an inbuilt router (routers are the devices where everybody plugs their network cables into).
But what happens if one or more people are hogging the internet, meaning they are probably downloading a lot of music and videos, this means it will be slow for everyone else. The other issue is that a lot of file sharing software (eg Bitcomet used to share torrents) people use to download the music and movies also send out data from your computer (uploading) of files you have downloaded and are currently downloading; other people want what you have! The issue is that these types of software do not set a limit on the upload speed by default; you have to manually change this in the options of the software, so people are going to be downloading from your computer (you are uploading to the them) at the maximums speeds of your internet plan, when this happens your whole home network will not be able to use the internet because there is no bandwidth left, most people are unaware of this and so fail to set a maximum upload speed in the file downloading software.
There is a simple solution to this and a more complicated but satisfactory for everyone solution. The simple solution is to tell the people to stop downloading music and videos or stop doing it at least during the normal times that other people want to use it if possible, perhaps let them know they can download after midnight to the early morning when nobody is using the internet in the home. This solution maybe not be perfect for everyone if people are using the internet at all different hours, so there will be no good time for them to download, for example someone in the house may leave their computer on to download before going to bed at midnight but then there is a student in the house and they need to use the internet for research in the early morning however it will be slow because of the other person downloading.
The second solution is to control your networks bandwidth (the speed at which people can download). There are some modems with inbuilt routers that have software to control speeds for each individual client (each computer on the network), but most are more expensive than usual. The best way is to setup an internet server computer, this is basically one dedicated computer (with Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 installed) that has the internet connection and every other computer connects to the server for internet. This way the server can install some bandwidth monitoring software and you will be able to configure the speeds at which people download and even set download limits for each person's computer on your home network.
Where can I get software to monitor bandwidth? The windows ISA Server can do this however it can be quite expensive, there are many cheaper solutions around, one being Softperfect's Bandwidth Manager, this excellen software allow you to set rules for individuals or groups on the home network and run reports on how much each person has downloaded and what speeds they are currently downloading at. Remember controlling and monitoring is the key to happy home internet network!
Read more Articles
|