Monitoring shared broadband usage

Tech Overhaul

Mate of mine is building two student apartments (Total of six rooms). I suggested that he put broadband in each room as a selling point. My question is if he gets in the broadband how do we monitor the usage from each room?
It would work out cheap enough for him to put BB in and BB is only 40 euro or so a month. But if one student moves in and starts downloading full movies every night & goes over the cap limit, it would be unfair to pass on the cost to every tenant. The fairest way is to monitor each room we could put a cap on each room so it would be free to them unless they went over their own limit.... but how?

theothernt

Hi,

My two suggestions are...

1. Build a small PC and install Linux on it. Additional software can then be installed to monitor or limit bandwidth usage.

2. If that's not to your liking, you can buy a Wireless Broadband/DSL Router (such as the Linksys WRT54G) with QoS (Quality of Service - ie. bandwidth limiting) instead.

- Neil

penexpers

Wizard Archer wrote:

Mate of mine is building two student apartments (Total of six rooms). I suggested that he put broadband in each room as a selling point. My question is if he gets in the broadband how do we monitor the usage from each room?
It would work out cheap enough for him to put BB in and BB is only 40 euro or so a month. But if one student moves in and starts downloading full movies every night & goes over the cap limit, it would be unfair to pass on the cost to every tenant. The fairest way is to monitor each room we could put a cap on each room so it would be free to them unless they went over their own limit.... but how?

So, wait, you want to share one 512k connection between up to 6 people? I think you should be looking at packages other than the 40 euro a month one(s). Even the 2 meg connection from Smart wouldn't be too great because of the relatively small upload rate.

lomb

Wizard Archer wrote:

Mate of mine is building two student apartments (Total of six rooms). I suggested that he put broadband in each room as a selling point. My question is if he gets in the broadband how do we monitor the usage from each room?
It would work out cheap enough for him to put BB in and BB is only 40 euro or so a month. But if one student moves in and starts downloading full movies every night & goes over the cap limit, it would be unfair to pass on the cost to every tenant. The fairest way is to monitor each room we could put a cap on each room so it would be free to them unless they went over their own limit.... but how?

it wont work, the slow upload will mean it grinds to a halt rather quickly.
u need esats business broadband with higher uploads and no caps, than just use a router. this will cost 100 per month. still not much considering. alternatively IBB 1meg lite is a good option with 1k up and 1k down, and no caps.

Tech Overhaul

I had an idea the 512 BB wouldn't be enough but its enough to start with. Its a shame the smart telecom broadband is only 128 upload.

lomb

like i said its b4 its 128 for a reason, they dont want anyone to go nuts with bit torrent. this is the program virtually all heavy downloaders use.

try IBB their 1meg lite service is good.

512 is def not enough with 128 upload. even connecting 2 pc onto this with one guy using bittorrent will suck up all the upload meaning even web page surfing on pc 2 is unusable