Limiting bandwidth on wireless router(?)

Hi! My wife recently became assistant manager over an apartment complex. The other manager wants to put wifi into the laundry room. I'm going to run a cat5 from the office to the laundry room. The run isnt far because the laundry building is right behind the office. Running the wire is a little off subject though. Im wanting to use there existing internet in the office to provide the service in the laundry room. I am wanting to limit the bandwidth available to the users in the laundry room to help deter them from bootleging movie and such. But still have it be acceptable from browsing the internet playing on facebook.

Ok now that all that is out of the way. I need to know what type of router i will need to be able to limit bandwidth, also y'alls idea of a decent limit to set it at. i was thinking about 1-3mbps limit that way it can handle multiple people using it at once but not be fast enough to be abused.

P.S. - i know this is in the software section but this is the one labeled internet,networking if this is indeed the wrong place. please tell me or moderators please move this thread. Thanks for any advice and help and im doing all this to mainly avoid them having to get a second internet account and getting another direct line ran to laundry room. If there is no other way to do what im wanting i will go about having the other service ran.

i think your going to be better off using some monitoring software that way you can make the users have to digitally sign an agreement that they are liable for what they do on your net,also you will be able to monitor what they are using it for as well as limit each users speeds.

there are several options out there maybe someone who has had to implement this will pop in and advise you to some specific software that will work best for you. but in the mean while i would Google something like" managing wifi for a motel" or something on those lines

This isn't much help, but Astaro (aka Sophos UTM 9) has a very feature rich QOS built in that can limit speeds just as you would like to do so. How to implement it into your network setup though is something else.

i wouldnt mind having monitoring software present, althought i really dont know how to go about setting up a network with the monitoring software. As sad as it seems i do not have an extra pc to use specifically for monitoring said network. im sure i could use the manager pc for this but ive never been able to share internet through a pc ive tried before just couldnt figure it out. is it possible to have to monitoring software on the managers pc and then also limit the network, another reason id want it limited is because i wouldnt want someone to come in and absolutely hog the bandwidth hindering their work progress. ill do some research into monitoring software. i just hope i can figure it all out. Thanks!!

Ive read a little about QoS services in routers, what your talking about does sound perfect. Everything I have read says that the QoS has to be in the router though so i guess thats way you mentioned not knowing how to implement it. If there was a router that just had a QoS that was able to limit bandwidth i think that would do the trick,

does anyone know of any router with a QoS like that built in?

I doubt anyone there would want to administer users and manage this, so I would target something more fundamental. If they have any problems, they'll get notice from their ISP, then it would be a good time to do a more advanced user based management system so offenders can be more easily identified. Most apartment complexes I have been at that provided internet did not have a user based administration system.

I'd use any router which can run DDWRT, then I'd use its QoS setting to throttle. You can throttle by protocol, so FTP/bittorrent/etc can be throttled heavily, while regular HTTP web use can run at full speed. I'd only give it 1mbps down, and that should also be enough to discourage abuse while still making the internet usable.

SuperScrilla said:

Ive read a little about QoS services in routers, what your talking about does sound perfect. Everything I have read says that the QoS has to be in the router though so i guess thats way you mentioned not knowing how to implement it. If there was a router that just had a QoS that was able to limit bandwidth i think that would do the trick,

does anyone know of any router with a QoS like that built in?

Click to expand...

What I meant by not knowing how to implement it, was that I do not know your network setup (are you the admin? do you have access to all hardware? can you purchase other hardware to replace current? etc etc etc) to give anything other then a suggestion on a possible solution.

That being said, Astaro (Sophos UTM) is available as both a software and hardware solution. The software solution would work on your own supplied hardware and act as the router/gateway for your network.There are other router distros available that also have QOS features built in, but as I do not use them, I cannot speak for how good the features are, although I do hear alot of good about pfSense which is a totally free router/firewall distro available (Astaro is free for home use and up to 50 IPs).

Consumer/Home grade routers with QOS functionality from what I have seen, are very limited in how you can implement bandwidth management. Many just simply detect certain network traffic (like gaming) and ensure that the packets have minimized latency, nothing more. If you can find a router that can have DD-WRT installed on it, that can be a viable alternative, but again, I do not know how QOS is implemented on it.

on top of this, i would also reccomend using Squid (or zentyal that has been mentioned before http://www.zentyal.org/) as a gateway. you can activate the proxy service and away you go. you will need a machine or a VM to use though.