Any Way to Measure Entire Home's Bandwidth Use?

Today my Mom is watching Netflix, my stepdad is playing Diablo 3, and my brother is playing Minecraft, all at the same time. I was playing a FPS online as well, but my ping kept shooting up so high I had to quit. We have a 20Mbps Internet connection, but I would like a way to measure the entire home's bandwidth usage to see if it's us fighting for bandwidth, or if it's just my game.

 

Some Routers all you to monitor traffic, which would be what you need. Ciscos routers with a solution called PRTG, and some NetGear Routers support this natively.

There's also the oen source firmware DD-WRT supports monitoring- you cab check if your router is supported, but this is only recommended if you really know what you are doing.

You should also check your ISP. Many allow you to check your realtime use.

 

Some routers have QoS settings. You can try setting game ports and ip ranges with higher priority to see if that helps.

 

If you've got that geek juice flowing in your veins, you might look at using PFSense on an old machine. It has a QOS that really does work. I have been using it for about 2 years now on an old pII 600mhz celeron with 256mb ram. Very stable and performs much better than any consumer router I have ever used. Just this weekend I built up a 2ghz p4 box and started using v2.0.2. It doesn't take much hardware to run.

A note for you that if you use 1ghz or less, use the older v1.2.3. If you use newer hardware, consider v2.0.x. There is also a pretty good traffic shaper with lots of features. I don't know how to use that very well yet, but it is quite promising. I have much the same situation as you do. QoS alone helps, but I would like to limit my kids bandwidth so I know what I have for myself.

There are also throughput graphs and statistics, as well as the ability to put up a transparent squid proxy. Really too much to mention. I cannot go back to a regular router now

Sul.

 

You could take a look at Networx, from softperfect (freeware, by the way) ... it's primarily intended (and is how I use it) to monitor net usage by a single computer, but can be set to monitor your entire network's usage. In my case, I don't have a network as such set up, but my wife and son have wireless adaptors set up on their computers to share my internet connection.

For our total usage, that's conveniently accessed via my ISP's online help, and Networx shows me how much of the total is mine (I've also got it installed on the other two, so if our total is running unusually high to the point where we might be pushing our cap, we can pin down which computer is doing most of the "damage".