AlainDelon

I am new to wireless networking and i thought i could use the internet on 2 or more computers simultaneausly and that you could allocate 50kb/s on one port of the router and 100kb/s on another.This does not seem to be possible or is it?The problem is that when my desktop is downloading torrents it locks the internet connection down and i can't connect to any website even though the total bandwith used by u-torrent is usually under 50kb/s while the available bandwith is 200kb/s.So i bought a wireless G router for my new laptop and i can only use the internet if both computers are surfing the web.If one ore the other are used for downloading,the other computer can NOT connect to the internet.Any torrent program seems to suck the whole life out of my internet connection even if it's using only 1/10th of the available bandwith.Any solutions to this?

al_bundy

check your router documentation about QoS and how to set it up. my ancient linksys has it, and your router should have it as well. it's usually controlled by port numbers

devynal

What do you mean by 'locking the internet connection down'? Does it become unresponsive or just really really slow?

I suspect you haven't set an upload speed limit for your torrents and thus are saturating the connection.

Dr Mabuse

the answer to your question on the sharing of internet connection to ports at a set rate is "yes"... but i suspect it will require sophisticated multi-port routers running IOS to accomplish... and this would be expensive, and highly technical to configure the router...

on the later question of a torrent 'locking down' the connection...

something seems wrong with that... there isn't enough information to even begin a guess at what... but something seems wrong there...

GHackmann

There's nothing "wrong" about it. ACK packets are competing against the outgoing BitTorrent traffic for outbound bandwidth and end up getting dropped. Lost ACKs wreak all kinds of havoc with TCP, and so you get huge throughput drops and connection failures.

The solution is either to throttle your BitTorrent client's upload rate, as devynal pointed out, or to set your router to prioritize ACK packets in its QoS settings.

AlainDelon

I have limited the upload speed to 50% of the download speed but even if the download speed is 5kb/s i can't surf the internet on the same computer OR any other computer on the network.Any download speed from 0-150 kb/s seem to just suck the life out of the connection.I have on rare occasions sustained a download speed of over 150 kb/s and when going "full bore" i can sometimes get a webpage to load slowly but as soon as the speed drops it is impossible to load a page.

Rex Fenestrarum

Something is seriously wrong somewhere with your setup. Many early 802.11b and 802.11g routers had an issue where the wireless end of the router would stop working after you ran Bittorrent for several days, but I believe that most routers have fixed this issue. And your Internet speeds should be more or less the same regardless of which computer is accessing the Internet - most home Internet connections are less than 10Mbps, and 802.11g can handle at least 23Mbps (most can easily do 54Gbps or faster these days), so there should be no "bottleneck" on the wireless end.

You haven't told us the most important thing yet - the make and model number of the router. Do that when you get a chance, as it'll help with the troubleshooting.

Just for the record, I've owned a Microsoft MN-700 router, a Gigabyte GN-B49G router, a D-link WBR-2310 router, and a Linksys WRT54GL (all with 802.11g wireless), and I've never experienced anything like the problem you mention (aside from the "BT bug" mentioned earlier, in which case the wireless portion would stop working entirely until the router was rebooted; without BT running on my computer, the problem would never appear).

Dr Mabuse

yep...

yep...

al_bundy

no, cheap home routers have been doing it for years

AlainDelon

It is a Netgear WGR614 V6 and it has the latest available firmware(2.0.19_1.0.19) available but i suspect that there is nothing wrong with the router because without it even connected i can not use my desktop for torrents and surfing at the same time.Being new to wireless i thought there was a way to "portion out" the available bandwith among the ports and the wireless port but it does not look like that's the case.When just connected to the internet without any torrent program running,everything seems fine with fast enough connection(150kb/s+) available on both the desktop and the wireless laptop.

Rex Fenestrarum

OK... first of all, when you say "kb" are you talking about kiloBITS or kiloBYTES? Because I have a bog-standard Road Runner connection, and my download speed is around 4800 kilobits, which is around 600 kilobytes. Generally speaking, kilobits are abbreviated "kb" while kilobytes are abbreviated "KB" or "kB".

The reason this is important is because if you've set your torrent program to run at 200kb and your Internet connection tops out at 5000kb, then something is terribly, terribly wrong, since 200kb is a tiny fraction of 5000kb. On the other hand, if your connection tops out at 5000kb and you've set up BT to run at 200KB, then that'sa significant chunk of your bandwidth.

So I guess my next question is... who is your ISP, and what level of service are you supposed to be getting? It's possible that your ISP is doing some QoS stuff of their own and throttling your connection when you run BT.

To answer your original question, I don't know of any SOHO routers that have the capacity to assign bandwidth per physical port. A few routers have the ability to do Quality of Service (QoS), in which you can divide up your bandwidth based on the MAC address of a device, or the ports the apps run on (say, port 25 for SMTP), or some combination of both.

Unfortunately, the Netgear WGR614 doesn't support this feature natively, and that router will not run third-party firmware like DD-WRT or Tomato. This is partly because your Netgear runs n different hardware than the DD-WRT\Tomato firmware is written for, but also because it has too little flash memory\SDRAM (1MB/8MB) to run anything else.

Lastly, I'm sure you're aware that downloading and uploading in BT have different consequences, right? I set uTorrent to upload at 30kb when I'm downloading stuff, and then jump to 45kb when those downloads are finished. This is because if my upload speeds exceed 30kb, it will saturate the entire connection, and download speeds (not just for BT, but everything) will slow to a crawl. Or they would, if I didn't have QoS set up on my Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato.

My point is, I can download stuff as fast as I want to, since I rarely find a torrent with enough seeds to saturate my connection. However, it's easy to saturate my connection if I have BT set to high upload speeds.