Sharing WIFI with 7 devices. Help :(

[Cappuccino]

I will be living with 7 people this year and 1 Wifi router in the house. So will be sharing 1 router obviously. So I was wondering, how will this affect me? I will most likely be downloading torrents, watching streams and gaming online (PC) will thus lag me like crazy, because 7 others connect to the same Wifi. I am really thinking about buying my own ISP, but then my flatmate might call me selfish and whatnot 🙁

I think we have the basic internet package because the landlord said he will sort it out for us. I highly doubt the landlord will buy us the mega package -_-

Anyone advice? Is this a concern I should look into? 😕

 

[lehtv]

What is the wifi router used? You'll probably run out of ip addresses, you need the router to create local ip's for all the different connections.

 

[Cappuccino]

What is the wifi router used? You'll probably run out of ip addresses, you need the router to create local ip's for all the different connections.

How do I do that? 😕

 

[Ken g6]

Why would she run out of IP addresses? Most NATting systems use a /24 subnet, which has a few less than 2^8 or 256 addresses available.

The concern is limited bandwidth. One thing you could do would be to set up a caching proxy. Squid seems to be the most stable and reliable. Polipo is also good, but needs to be run in a loop in case it crashes. (It seems to do so frequently on my machine.) In either case, have all the flat-mates use the proxy for best results.

I was also looking around for either Opera's or Chrome's image-compressing proxy server addresses, but I haven't found them yet.


Edit: More ideas coming to mind:
Enable "QoS" or Quality of Service, on your router. This prioritizes things like streaming video and gaming over things like web surfing and torrents.

If you do decide to get a separate internet connection, consider getting an Internet link aggregation software. I think there's only one, and Googling for one turned up Connectify Dispatch, but there might be others. Use that with your caching HTTP proxy, and your flatmates can't really accuse you of being selfish.

 

[Aikouka]

Yeah, unless you've got some crazy settings in your router, DHCP-available IP addresses aren't an issue. For example, my router is set to as sign 192.168.0.100 through 192.168.0.255, which means I've got 156 available addresses.

Anyway, there are two things that you can run into, and Ken touched on one of them.

1) The biggest issue is bandwidth. Unfortunately, just telling us that you have a basic Internet package doesn't really mean much because the tiers can vary wildly among areas. However, you can have a ton of bandwidth and still run into issues. For example, some people don't adjust their torrent settings and end up saturating their upload. To simplify why this is a problem, I usually just say, "You gotta be able to upload to download." (It deals with proper packet response and junk, which is a requirement with TCP) That's where Ken's advice on QoS may come into play.

2) Now, this is another technical thing that may become an issue depending on how often these people use the connection and what they use it for. WiFi -- like pretty much any omnidirectional wireless transmission tech -- is really just a radio. Unlike the radio in your car, not all users are supposed to get the same data, so to support multiple unique users, tech like WiFi (and even your cell phone) use what's called "time slices." Honestly, they're exactly what they sound like... the router will essentially cut out a piece of its transmission time for each device.

In regard to WiFi being a radio technology, another issue that you hear about -- far more often than time slicing 😛 -- is interference. WiFi works on one of two frequencies: 2.4GHz or 5GHz. Anything also transmitting on this same frequency can cause issues with your router. In the past, people had problems with cordless phones as they almost all ran on 2.4GHz and so did pretty much all routers. Now, people say "aren't all phones cordless" as they hold up their cellphone, so that's not an issue; however, if you live in an area with a lot of other people, you may have... HOTSPOT HELL! Essentially, you have so many routers and only so many channels to operate on. So, you do want to ensure that you're at least running on 5GHz.

As for "being selfish" by having your own connection, if you're planning on eating a large piece of the Internet connection pie, it's probably far more beneficial to them if you have your own connection.