[Technical] A "real" world problem for consideration

[Roland Gesthuizen]

Yes Kevork, it is an interesting dilemma how best to divide up the Internet
commons by dishing out small portions at a time or using straws to eat.

I think your proposal to cap bandwidth is easy enough to do with your setup
.. I like the idea of giving each user slice of the available bandwidth. At
a stab, a third should be fine as they probably wont notice the drop in
performance when the fourth user jumps online as they are used to hopping
about on one leg. You can fine tune this by further capping their collective
bandwidth if the cable modem link gets close to its limit (perhaps your plan
already does this). It should also be easy enough to track, tally and report
usage by IP.

Regards Roland

On 21/04/06, Kevork Krozian <Kroset at novell1.fhc.vic.edu.au> wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
>       In one of my other areas of interest I provide accommodation to
> overseas students around a major university.
> One of these properties has an Optus cable modem internet link shared by 4
> workstations through a switching router eg. Netgear or similar.
>
>   Recently there has been a fair amount of tension between the students
> playing the blame game of accusing each other of slowing down the internet
> link or downloading more than their fair share ( 12GB link  midday to
> midnight, 3 GB each if all is fair   ---    20GB midnight to midday, 5 GB
> each if the daytime limit is not breached ) for the month.
>
>   The solution needs to be  two  ( maybe three ) fold:
>
>                      1. Bandwidth management -- each user gets one quarter
> of available bandwidth
>                      2. Download usage management -- each user gets no
> more than one quarter of the limit for the month. User can check balance.
>                      3. Not be so expensive to setup and maintain , that
> it makes the solution more expensive than setting up individual ADSL lines
> for each student.
>
>    There is a linux solution --  between cable modema and switching router
> --  ( no need for anything higher than a PIII to do the job ) using Squid to
> throttle bandwidth but this may be a hard limit eg. 50Kbps rather than "
> fetch current bandwidth, divide by four , update bandwidth allowed for each
> " .  Any gateway running a Windows platform solution will call for a high
> end machine and that alone makes any solution prohibitive.  Or , divide
> available bandwidth by number of users rather than by 4 as there may be
> bandwidth wasted if not everyone is on the network.
>    There is the issue of the rapidly fluctuating throughput measured eg.
> It is not unusual for a machine at home on a small network to record
> anything from 100Kbps to 400 Kbps during a short period depending what else
> is happening.
>
>    So, any thoughts out there from my esteemed colleagues ??
>
> Regards
>
>
>
> Kevork Krozian
> IT Manager , Forest Hill College
> k.krozian at fhc.vic.edu.au
> http://www.fhc.vic.edu.au
> Mobile: 0419 356 034
>
>
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--
--
Roland Gesthuizen - ICT Coordinator - Westall Secondary College
http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
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