Dividing up bandwidth on an Internet connection?

Can Internet service delivered by a single vendor to a single residence be electronically subdivided into separate channels delivered to several individual users, with fixed and pre-specified ratios between the bandwidths delivered to each individual user?

[I don't need a detailed answer to the this question at this point, but I'd like to know if it makes any sense with normally available Internet routers and related hardware.]

To be more specific, suppose I have a residence with a primary living area plus three separate rental studios. Into this residence comes an Internet connection, delivered let's say by Comcast or some similar vendor. The bandwidth of this connection is claimed by the vendor to be, let's say for round numbers, 100 Mb/s, and it actually delivers something close to this a reasonable fraction of the time.

Is there some way I can split this service at the point of entry with some appropriate hardware so that, at least when things are working well and the external connection is delivering full bandwidth, each tenant will get a 10 Mb/s connection and I'll get a 70 Mb/s connection? -- and beyond that, so that none of us will be able to get more than our assigned bandwidth even if others are currently offline, nor will any user be able externally drag down the data rate seen by any of the others?

[It would also be desirable for each of these four sub-networks to be protected against incursions from any of the others, so that they operate like four individually private password-protected subnetworks, with me of course knowing all four passwords -- or at least having full access to the equipment that's splitting out these connections.]

I've not thought about the messier question of how this bandwidth splitting might be designed and made to work if the primary service bandwidth were to drop substantially for a while -- e.g., if the 100 Mb/s degrades substantially, maybe the system then drops all four hannel rates proportionally until they get down to 3, 3, 3 and 21 Mb/s, after which the 3s are clamped at that level and the 21 continues dropping.

I don't recall seeing any discussion of systems like this. Are "data bandwidth splitters", as contrasted to "signal frequency splitters", readily available at the retail level?

Reply to
AES
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Sure. See "bandwidth management" or "bandwidth manager".

etc, and plenty more.

Some cheapo routers and alternative firmware for routers (i.e. DD-WRT) have this feature built in. I'm too lazy to look right now. Oops... that feature is not free in DD-WRT:

Bandwidth management is different from QoS (quality of service) which simply guarantees that a specific application or user has sufficient bandwidth by delaying other applications or users packets.

You need to have some way to identify users and restrict their available bandwidth based on some identifier. If you decide to have a separate PC doing the bandwidth management, you might want to add a RADIUS server and have everyone login with a username and password. This way, you don't need to know where they are located, or which way they are connected, just who they are. A RADIUS server is also a big improvement to wireless security.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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