College Apartment DSL *sucks* help!

[superant23]

I lived in this apartment all summer which has "built-in" DSL, and it was quite fast, I figured out it was a 1.5MBps line from nTelos. Well, once everyone moved in for fall semester, *bam*. Now with RARE exceptions (like when the power just comes back on, or sometimes around 5am) i get those speeds or close. But 99% of the time, I download at like 2kbps and have pings from 1500-3000ms. I found out there are only two DSL lines for the building, which houses 34 people and thus at least 34 computers (everyone is a student). Now due to the horrible speeds the landlord says they are "Shopping around for other providers". I'm trying to tell them it doesn't matter what provider they get, it's still going to be slow. I think the solution is traffic control, cause they don't have it. Are there any plug-n-play routers that have this built in and easy to configure?

 

[alkemyst]

Like you said, it's not your provider at all, and it's really not the 34 students if they were just surfing and the like....that is if you have two true 1.5Mbps DSL lines coming in and properly routed.

Traffic control can be handled by many routers, it's not really going to be plug and play at that level though and with file sharing applications using even port 80 now it becomes really hard to block things.

What you have is probably someone or a few people serving files and uploading files (uploads really kill dsl bandwidth). If there was anything in the lease that excludes that then it's an easy fix with just some monitoring software to target the violators....the provider may assist even if the landlord asks which login is pulling down 'his' connection. YMMV on that one though

The problem is however since this appears to be a 'private' apartment off campus, unless it stated in the original lease that the dsl was limited it may be too late to change that.

Depending on your budget your own DSL line (if possible) would be best, esp if you can share the costs with a few trusted people.

 

[cmetz]

superant23, Dell's managed Ethernet switches support traffic shaping, and that might be the cheapest and reasonbly effective way to solve this problem - simply put a peak cap on every Ethernet drop down to each end user, and if particular users continue to be pigs, drop their caps. (the same switch allows SNMP traffic stats collection, so you can better tell who the pigs are) They're reasonable to configure, too. 48 port MSRPs at like $900 and can probably be dealed down.

 

[martind1]

(uploads really kill dsl bandwidth).

of course, uploads only kill the thoughput one way. up. of course that does have an effect on the downloads too(only that you cant get room on the up to communicate out.)

If it is ADSL then the up will get saturated quite a bit quicker than the down since the up is usally only 128, or so.

two 1.5 dsl lines should be quite a bit of throughput for 34 people. its those damn p2p networks that are killing everyone most liekly.

 

[alkemyst]

Originally posted by: martind1

(uploads really kill dsl bandwidth).

of course, uploads only kill the thoughput one way. up. of course that does have an effect on the downloads too(only that you cant get room on the up to communicate out.)

If it is ADSL then the up will get saturated quite a bit quicker than the down since the up is usally only 128, or so.

two 1.5 dsl lines should be quite a bit of throughput for 34 people. its those damn p2p networks that are killing everyone most liekly.

Acutually uploads kill the whole dsl chain regardless of what technically it's affecting.

 

[Torghn]

Is there some way to dynamicaly shape the network bandwith? Set it so the more bandwith you use the lower priority you get. That way no one is capped, but if you use a lot of bandwith you will only get what's not being used, and thoes just surfing and casualy downloading will get fast connections.

 

[alkemyst]

Originally posted by: Torghn
Is there some way to dynamicaly shape the network bandwith? Set it so the more bandwith you use the lower priority you get. That way no one is capped, but if you use a lot of bandwith you will only get what's not being used, and thoes just surfing and casualy downloading will get fast connections.

that's not really a fair way to do it....this situation is not a work environment or school type one...you have to see what the lease says.

I know if I was told I'd get DSL I'd assume it would be dedicated and I'd be planning on using it.

I think the best solution would be more lines with maybe a lower cap on each, say 256k or whatever.

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

Linux computer with router software, enable bandwidth limiting.

I've been looking at this package, it sounds like just the ticket for your situation, and it's free. Smoothwall Gateway/Router

 

[StraightPipe]

landlord needs at least 5-10 DSL lines to serve that many people.