Help on broadband bandwidth sharing problems (Torrents and Gaming confliction)

[Butanoicacid]

Ok! Just to set up the story at the moment;

Me and my housemates have an ntl broadband 4mb connection that we share through a netgear WGR614 v6 router. I am currently connected via cable, while the rest of my housemates use wireless PCI network cards.

The problem: My housemate loves to download stuff via the μ-torrents and limewire programs. I work and the others go to lectures during most of the day, so this isn't too much of a problem. However, the rest of the time, whenever any of us try and use the internet for anything like browsing websites/downloading off ftp or playing online games, we can't because the μ-torrents are just taking up all the bandwidth. Now when me and another housemate have the 'net to ourselves, I can play WoW and he can play Quake/Download off steam/Download off websites and Its all fine. We've pinpointed it to my other housemates torrents.

So, what I want to know is...

Has anybody used these programs before, and/or do you know the best way to solve this so we can all get a fair share of the bandwidth.

Would restricting his downloads to certain ports not used by much else fix this, (so they don't conflict with applications we use, i.e. Firefox, World of warcraft, Quak 4, etc), or would we just have to limit his download and/or upload speeds?

We all pay an equal share for this broadband so we want to make it so we all can use it for whatever we want, whenever we want basically.

Any help would be appreciated as this is starting to cause some problems :P

[GroundZero3]

well i would say talk to him first about the situation and the problems.

Does the router support QOS? Granted most of the time its very limited or barely works on home routers but its a shot.

[Vyx]

Within u-torrent, there should be a way to limit the ammount of badwidth that the client is avaliable to use. I've never used u-torrent but I use a program called Azureus for torrents in which I'm able to set the ammount of up/download badwidth avaliable.

In Azureus its under Option > Transfer > then up/download are individual.

This way you could limit the ammount of bandwith that he gets ie. divide your badwith by the number of people and viola, even sharing.

[GroundZero3]

To limit the upload go to options, preferences, click connection and you can set the limit of bandwidth.

However some routers have a problem in general when torrents are being used and cant handle the connections

[Butanoicacid]

Ok looking at it myself, I can see this now. I guess it will be trial and error until we find a value that works ?

Another idea maybe would be to restrict the torrents to not use UPnP and to use a specific port each time?

E.g. UPnP is set to off, and port set to 10000?

[GroundZero3]

What speeds does your ISP offer you?

[Butanoicacid]

4 meg

[GroundZero3]

Is that up and down?

You will need to play around with the speeds to find out what will be best so everyone can surf and use the internet together.