What router has Bandwidth Management ..?

Hi Everyone,

Here is my little issue. My fiance's Mum always has OS Students living with her and they love to nail her Optus bandwitch within the first few days of the month and cap the speed.

All the laptops are running on wireless, is there a way to limit the amount of data all connected PC can use in a specific period?

For example, all DHCP clients are alowed 2Gb traffic for 30 days.

I don't want to limit their speed, just the amount of data they can download in a specific priod.

Cheers, Chris.

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Reply to
krizto
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Hi, Is she using any routers. If yes then it is possible. Can u get me brand name of the router... Do visit this website too for all networking info.

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Thanks. Manu

Reply to
qwerty

krizto hath wroth:

This is a "traffic quota". This is normally done at an ISP using monitoring software such as MRTG, RRDTOOL, PRTL, and various ISP billing programs. At some threshold, it simply pulls the plug on the account until the customer can cough up more cash to support their downloading habits.

Such quota management is usually not implimented in the router. That's because users can change their IP addresses fairly easily and ruin the traffic accounting. Storing the logins and passwords in the router also becomes somewhat of a bloat problem. Normally, such quota management is done in a management workstation.

Offhand, I don't know of a specific wireless device that will do what you're asking. However, it might exist and my sushi and saki fogged brain isn't sufficiently functional to recall the vendor.

Until I recover, the best I can suggest is that you install a dedicated management workstation to collect traffic statistics by MAC address (by machine, not by IP address), and simply log the traffic. Logging can be done by sniffing or preferably by using SNMP. Then, split the bill according to usage. I've done this with MRTG a few times with fairly good results. Everyone overuses the system the first month. Then the bill arrives and they magically become more conservative.

Search for "traffic accounting".

This looks interesting:

Total statistics for MRTG. The graphs shown are for the entire network traffic, but the data can be filtered or selectively polled by IP address or MAC address resulting in one page per MAC address (i.e. per machine).

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Another idea to consider would be to add another wifi router, one configured with wifi security (WPA) and setup solely for use by the guests. Then add the traffic monitoring, MRTG works well. It'd even be possible to track the live packet usage from the separate router and CUT IT OFF should the traffic exceed certain amounts.

It'd end up being a bit of a configuration adventure, but you could do this with an old PC running linux and two ethernet cards. The PC would act as a 'traffic cop'. Plug the student wifi router into one of it's ethernet ports, and plug the other into the ISP switch. Configure the student's wifi router as an access point, not as a gateway or a router. Then configure the PC as a router. Then just configure the scripts on it to cut off the ethernet port of the student wifi rig. You could get all sorts of fancy with configuring it. You could even set it up to re-direct ALL web traffic from the student port to a web page showing traffic stats if/when they run over the limits.

So no, there's not one box that'll do it, at least not at a reasonable price. But a cheapie PC with linux and some configuring would do it quite well.

-Bill Kearney

Reply to
Bill Kearney

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