Splitting ADSL line

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Fonzy

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Hi guys, i just want to know if there is a way to 'split' or devide my adsl line at home.
Basicaly we have a 4meg line and the only people that use it are me and my brother.
I am a gamer, that is pretty much all that i use the internet for, and obviously i need a smooth con for that.

My brother on the other hand doesnt play games online, but yet he downloads pretty much all day everyday.

So is there a way that i can theoretically split our line into two 2 meg lines?
He does turn the downloads slow for me when i want to play, but its still spikey,i understand that
he also wants to use the internet, like i do,but this whole situation isnt working to well.

Is there perhaps a router we can get to do this, or firmware that we can install on the existing router, or am i living in a dream world.

Im not to clued up on all this tech stuff so any help will be much appreciated. Thank you
 
I think you can with some routers create QOS - limit an app to use a sertain amount of bandwidth only. Not sure of all the new models out there, but QoS maybe a help here in limiting.
 
Im not sure what QOS is exactly, but doesnt that just limit certain ports or something ? What im looking for is a stable line, not just protectioin from torrents. Eg : if im in a game and then i start lagging due to my brother going on facebook or something, if that makes sense. I dnt want to have to keep having to ask him to stop untill a game of dota is done you know. Will be nice to have peace of mind going into a game knowing that its going to be lag free instead of thinking, am i going to lag half way through again :/

Thank you for the input so far, Looking forward to any more advice/help :)
 
QoS = Quality of service, which is a way of shaping (prioritizing) traffic according to certain rules that you define.
Unfortunately QoS alone isn't enough to keep the latencies down for gaming. You will have to do rate limiting or both rate limiting and QoS.

NetLimiter 2 Pro / 3 Pro should do the trick, but it would cost you around R210 for a license though.

MikroTik routers and routers that supports DD-WRT firmware can also be used to do the rate limiting and QoS. I prefer the MikroTik RB750.

If you can fork out money on a router, but already have a Linux PC lying around, then you can setup something like SmoothWall or IPCop.
You could always run SmoothWall / IPCop / MikroTik RouterOS in a virtual machine if your PC is on 24/7 and is powerful enough to handle the CPU load + memory usage.
 
Otherwise, time-share works.
(Where you get exclusive use for 1/5 the day, and he gets exclusive use for 2/5 of the day, and you get shared use for 3/5 the day.)

Technically speaking, if you both run your own PPPOE connections instead of using the router's on-board connection, you'll be sharing the line 42%/42% with the remaining 6% going to PPPOE overhead.

But, the real problem is that downloads use maximum packet size, whereas online gaming uses much smaller packet size. The effect of this is that you will have to wait for the larger packet to arrive before your smaller packet will arrive, and this creates disparity on the sharing, resulting in the online gamer getting a much smaller effective piece of the available bandwidth.

You can force the download machine connection to utilise a much smaller packet size (say 450 bytes) to lessen this impact, which will result in less efficient usage of bandwidth for the downloader, but a much smoother mix for the overall effect. Look to see if the router has a MTU setting, and try to set it to 350 bytes to see the effect (but remember to set it back when you're not gaming because downloading with such a small packet size is extremely inefficient)

This is a very difficult topic to address, but you need to understand all the parameters involved.
 
You can also run IPCop in a virtual machine on the machine doing the downloading if you don't have a spare machine lying about.
I have used IP Cop's prioritising facilities with great success after forcing the entire network onto a maximum packet size of 720 bytes, but, copying from PC to PC suffered terrible degradation.
 
davemc said:
Technically speaking, if you both run your own PPPOE connections instead of using the router's on-board connection, you'll be sharing the line 42%/42% with the remaining 6% going to PPPOE overhead.
Click to expand...
Where have you seen a router doing this?

I can do something like that on the MikroTik router of mine by rate limiting the PPPoE connections to 50/50%, but it won't split it like that by default when I'm dialing 2 PPPoE connections.
 
Pada said:
Where have you seen a router doing this?

I can do something like that on the MikroTik router of mine by rate limiting the PPPoE connections to 50/50%, but it won't split it like that by default when I'm dialing 2 PPPoE connections.
Click to expand...
Hu?
The router is really simple, it will pop the PPPOE packets into the send queue and send them as soon as the line is "free", on a first come-first serve basis.
The sending operating system will only send more data to the router once the router signals that it can accept more data.
The net effect of this is a pretty even split in line usage on a packet by packet basis.
 
I'm still not convinced that it would split it evenly. I get the concept of the packet queue, but the problem is that the amount of packets received for the download is far more than the packets received by the game.

If you were to download a file on PPPoE #1 and game on PPPoE #2, then I would assume that PPPoE #1 would get basically all the bandwidth except for the few kbps that the game requires. eg. 3400kbps for PPPoE #1 and 50kbps for PPPoE #2
 
PPPoE #1 would get more of the bandwidth, because the data content inside the packets is almost 4MB, whereas the data inside the packets for PPPoE #2 is around 64 bytes.
But, if you looked at the number of packets transmitted, I bet that PPPoE #2 would have transferred close to the same number of packets.

So, if you had to force both connections to use the same packet size, a more even bandwidth usage would result.

The test you're talking about can also be:
- PPPoE#1 starts a download
- PPPoE#2 starts a download
Now how much bandwidth do you think they'll share?
 
Hmm.

Currently I'm dialing a PPPoE connection from my D-Link DSL-2500U (MTU=1492) and one from my MikroTik RB750 (MTU=512).
The average download speed across both PPPoE connections are about 18kB/s from the Mweb news server.
So what you've said is true: that the PPPoE connections would be 50/50 if you're downloading on both.

I then launched CS1.6 and ran it over PPPoE #1 (MTU=1492) and kept downloading over PPPoE #2 (MTU=512).
The downloads then continued at 35kB/s, leaving absolutely no room for CS.
 
AFAIK, The Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) is nothing more than a network protocol for encapsulating Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) frames inside Ethernet frames - it doesn't do any more QoS/"balancing" for multiple client endpoints than a plain old vanilla network switch would natively do for each PC plugged into one of its network ports. As Pada says, having multiple PPPoE sessions does not imply that each of those sessions gets an even allocation of the available bandwidth - rather, each PPPoE session is just another potential user of the total potentially available bandwidth. A 'battle for bandwidth' is therefore inevitable unless the pipe is more than adequate, or QoS is implemented
 
Pada said:
NetLimiter 2 Pro / 3 Pro should do the trick, but it would cost you around R210 for a license though.

Thanks for the input guys. I really do appreciate it. Alot of this stuff is very technical for me hahaha. The most simple solution if im understanding it right, seems to be what Pada says here.
I dnt mind forking out a couple of hundred Rand if it means i can get a smooth gaming experience.

Pada, am i understanding you right here? Basicaly if i purchase Netlimiter, there is a setting to "split" our line up ? Im just worried i go ahead and purchase Netlimiter and then i misunderstood something, or i cant get it right, if that makes sense.

Thank you
Click to expand...
 
No. There are no cheap hardware or software that I know of that would give you an option to divide the traffic equally. However you do get cheap routers that would allow you to specify rate limits, like the MikroTik RB750 for R310 ex VAT.

For NetLimiter:
You install it on both you and your brother's PC, and then you specify rate limits on the PC's Internet zone.
eg. 1700kbps (210KB/s) down, 200kbps (25KB/s) up.
That way you will effectively have half of the line for yourself, since your ADSL line's maximum TCP/IP throughput would be more or less 3400kbps up/400kbps up.

You can still download NetLimiter 3 Beta to give the idea a try.
 
Fonzy said:
I dnt mind forking out a couple of hundred Rand if it means i can get a smooth gaming experience.
Click to expand...
Your BEST bet would be a MikroTik RB750 router with properly configured QoS scripts, as Pada says... It's not expensive, and if you have the patience to learn and configure a bit, you'll be amazed at how awesome/valuable it is =) I don't lag anymore, even if my sister goes crazy on facebook. Muahauahaha
 
What fragtion said, though I'd like to know what game fragtion is playing.

@Pada, CS's packet size is freaking tiny, something like 32 bytes or something pathetic like that. You would have to change your MTU on PPPoE1 to something like 64 bytes instead of 1492 for the test to have any value before starting up CS.
 
davemc:
My D-Link DSL-2500U won't allow me to set the MTU lower than 576, and my MikroTik won't allow me to set it lower than 512 either.

So yeah, your only option would be to use rate limiting.
 
I had the same problem. Family member watching streaming video or torrenting and hogging most of the line speed which made my gaming unpleasant.

Mikrotik 750G (plain 750 will do as well) with queues (bandwidth limiting) solved the problem nicely. I love my little 750G, so much functionality for it's price. You can even script the queues to kick in only at a certain time of the day, or adjust the size of queuing. What I did is write a program in VB.NET to detect when I load up my game on my pc and it talks to the 750G via the Mikrotik API and enables the queues and disables them when I quit my game. Thus the queues are in force only when needed and I don't forget to turn them off again when I quit my game.
 
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