ADSL bandwidth splitting evenly

Hi guys

I have a client that has a student house that he wants to get ADSL for and he's looking at 4mb.
There are 8 students that need access.

There's only one physical telephone line to the premises and he doesn't want 8 telkom lines to the house.
How can we split the 4MB line evenly to the 8 PC's so that each gets 512Kb speeds? If one user decides to download a big file we don't want that one user to hog all the bandwidth.

We will be using wireless and cable connections as some students will have notebooks and some PC's.

I understand you get options like netlimiter, load balancers, etc., but we need something as cheap as possible.

Your help is much appreciated.

A RB750 will do the job for you - but you're going to need to be willing to learn how to configure it.

not enough information to give a correct answer.

Does this one line share one isp account or will each student be responsible to get their own isp account ?

Guessing it is one isp account, then simply put a mikrotik router just after the adsl modem and throttle each user to max 512Kb speeds, configure the mikrotik with 8 different pptp users. Give the usernames/password to the students and lock up the router. Plenty of tutorials on mikrotik how to do it.

setting up the pptp
http://wispwatchers.com/node/3


or set up a hotspot
http://aacable.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/mikrotik-hotspot-quick-setup-guide-cli-version/

or go read this, you will probably only want to use the mikrotik setup (first part)
http://aacable.wordpress.com/2011/07/19/mikrotik-dmasoftlab-rm-squid-zph-linux-bridgecomplete-guide/

Thanks for the info so far guys.

All the students are going to use the same ISP, but each student will have their own account with the ISP and dial via PPOE

biena said:

not enough information to give a correct answer.

Does this one line share one isp account or will each student be responsible to get their own isp account ?

Guessing it is one isp account, then simply put a mikrotik router just after the adsl modem and throttle each user to max 512Kb speeds, configure the mikrotik with 8 different pptp users. Give the usernames/password to the students and lock up the router. Plenty of tutorials on mikrotik how to do it.

setting up the pptp
http://wispwatchers.com/node/3


or set up a hotspot
http://aacable.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/mikrotik-hotspot-quick-setup-guide-cli-version/

or go read this, you will probably only want to use the mikrotik setup (first part)
http://aacable.wordpress.com/2011/07/19/mikrotik-dmasoftlab-rm-squid-zph-linux-bridgecomplete-guide/

Click to expand...

It's straight forward until you mentioned that each user are dialing their own connections.
You can't simply limit the WLAN/ETH throughput because then you're screwing with the latency (turning a network into dialup).
A RouterBoard/Dlink Linux router is your best bet, maybe get a proper 4Mb account (unshaped/etc) and share that one account with the users.

Hey, I'm working with Grimlock, can't we just set up delay pools?

Get a Mikrotik router with the AP built in and connect to one DSL modem either via PPPoE or DHCP.

I have found that bandwidth management with Mikrotik is dependant on available continuous line speed. The recent Afrihost outage screewed with my bandwidth sharing during the daytime as I also share internet between multiple users.

Set up Queues with PCQ (using an address split, NOT port) so that you get fair distribution of speed between users but still get high line utilization. This improves general browsing and as more people connect and draw traffic the available bandwidth get's split according to the load.

Will each user be able to connect via PPPOE from each PC? I'm on the mikrotik website now. Are you talking about the routerboard products? This for example - http://routerboard.com/RB711UA-2HnD

Timber_MG said:

Get a Mikrotik router with the AP built in and connect to one DSL modem either via PPPoE or DHCP.

I have found that bandwidth management with Mikrotik is dependant on available continuous line speed. The recent Afrihost outage screewed with my bandwidth sharing during the daytime as I also share internet between multiple users.

Set up Queues with PCQ (using an address split, NOT port) so that you get fair distribution of speed between users but still get high line utilization. This improves general browsing and as more people connect and draw traffic the available bandwidth get's split according to the load.

Click to expand...

You can set up a PPPoE server (Radius) and monitor usage too and even shape based on a traffic type. I just let DHCP dish out an address and that splits the internet fairly between active users. Done right I can run a 20 thread download on my NAS and start streaming youtube on my desktop and I get half the speed to the YouTube and half to the server. If my wife then streams from her laptop it gets split 3 ways.

I checked the details on this model - http://routerboard.com/RB750GL Seems it will do the job. Which model are you using if you don't mind me asking?

Timber_MG said:

You can set up a PPPoE server (Radius) and monitor usage too and even shape based on a traffic type. I just let DHCP dish out an address and that splits the internet fairly between active users. Done right I can run a 20 thread download on my NAS and start streaming youtube on my desktop and I get half the speed to the YouTube and half to the server. If my wife then streams from her laptop it gets split 3 ways.

Click to expand...

Timber_MG:
I recently found out that if you're shaping/throttling the incoming speed with MikroTik RouterOS on an ADSL connection, that you need to set the max limits to like the line speed * 0.8, otherwise the Queue Tree does not work like it should!
Like on my 2Mbps MWEB Uncapped account (on 2Mbps ADSL) I have to use a max-limit of 1650kbps and then the shaping is absolutely fantastic!

@Grimlock:
Sharing the bandwidth equally amongst multiple users is pretty simple with MikroTik routers, because they have a queue type (PCQ) that can count how many active users (based on source/destination IP addresses) and then it simply gives the active users equal bandwidth (total bandwidth / active users).


For this kind of setup, I'll recommend:
MikroTik RB750 - cheapest MikroTik router that I know of
D-Link DSL-2500U - unless you already have an ADSL modem that can work in bridge mode
A 1Gbps switch + WiFi AP with 300Mbps (802.11n) & MIMO support

You can do away with less equipment, but then you'll have to dial the PPPoE connection from the ADSL router (that includes the WiFi AP) and set its IP address to like 192.168.1.2 subnet mask 255.255.255.254 and the MikroTik's WAN to 192.168.1.3 subnet mask 255.255.255.254 (or 192.168.1.3/31) and set its default gateway & DNS to 192.168.1.2. You can leave its LAN ports in the 192.168.88.* range.
You'll also need to disable PPPoE Relaying/Half-Bridge mode on the ADSL router.
This way other people can't use their own ISP accounts and bypass your shaping rules.

@Pada: I have my 10 meg line limit set to 6-8 meg and it worked very well assuming Afrihost is not up to its recent daytime issues where I dropped the max speed to 3 Mbps at times.

I love how file downloads and streaming and what not all get 80% of line speed and if there is contention it is split up fairly without totally wrecking latencies. I have not gotten around to advanced protocol forwarding and low latency things, but I have not had any issues other than when there is a major slowdown from the ISP.

Hi There,
Mikrotik router is the best way forward and others have told you of a few ways to configure it.
Go with one account at the ISP. Your client is probably looking at each one having their own account to ease the collection of money for the connectivity. I would build the cost of the connectivity into the rental.

Regards Tim