Need some good advice

[breadbox]

Well we moved to a new home recently and our adsl speed at the old home was 10mbs. It was awesome. My sister could download all her series ect and we could play online games without lagging in the process. Now however our speed is limited to a 4mbs line. My sister is CONSTANTLY downloading something or my brother is almost always on the web watching videos/surfing so my ping takes quite a beating! Before the move this was never a problem but the difference between 4mbs and 10mbs is quite big!

I've been thinking about it and thought why don't I just get my own adsl line just for gaming (At the moment my sister is paying for the internet - everyone buys their own cap though). This seems like the most simple solution. I'm a hardcore gamer so low ping is very important to me. Gaming is a big time hobby of mine and constantly dying/lagging out in games because if lag/delay is not cool. The game I play the most is Warcraft 3 / DotA on a South African server. Where my ping would normaly be in the 40s it jumps between 50 and 700 constantly. Way too much for a locally hosted game.


Does anyone know if this is possible at all? If so how do I go about this? Do I just call Telkom and request they install an additional adsl line for me?

 

[SYNERGY]

Look @ a QoS/Shaping solution so that your gaming packets have highest priority?

 

[stricken]

Ask Telkom if they can upgrade to 10mbps. They dont do it anymore unless you ask. (unless you are too far from xchange)

 

[Pada]

Upgrading to 10Mbps won't make a noticeable difference, because then they'll just saturate that as well.

You'll need software/hardware to both limit the speed and perhaps also prioritize the traffic.

You can manage the bandwidth quite nicely with a MikroTik RB750, but it could take a while to setup for someone who aren't trained on the MikroTik devices. I'm actually not sure what other hardware/software could be used to do this kind of limiting & QoS easily for a whole home network, because something like NetLimiter will work, but its going to be costly and horrible to manage.

MikroTik RouterOS (which is the operating system that runs on the MikroTik hardware) can be set up using WinBox, which is a Windows GUI that would make the setting up much easier.
There are quite a lot of tutorials/wiki pages on how to configure certain things on the MikroTik, and you'll get loads of support on their forums, and perhaps here as well.

With the MikroTik RB750 setup, my suggestion would be that you give each person at your home an equal cut of the bandwidth using a PCQ (per connection classifier) queue that identifies traffic according to the destination IP (which will be your LAN IP addresses for incoming traffic). Using this kind of queue, you specify that the maximum bandwidth is like 3.36Mbps (~85% of 4Mbps) and then it will divide the incoming traffic according to the number of active users in your home.
So if only you are downloading, you'll get 3.36Mbps. If you and your sister are downloading, then you'll each get 50% of 3.36Mbps. If a 3rd person joins in, then you'll all get 33.3% of 3.36Mbps.

If you want to be nasty, then you dedicate like 1Mbps for gaming, by changing the queue's bandwidth to 2.36Mbps, and then use packet marking such that your game traffic doesn't get places in the queue