2 networks, 1 router

[Keytachi]

Me and my brother are always quarreling about the internet, who uses up more bandwidth and slows down the other and stuff.

I've been reading about routers and i came by an interesting information...
If a router has 2 networks (assigned by different subnet masks, YYY.YYY.YYY.Y and XXX.XXX.XXX.X) it would sort out the packets to avoid clogging up the pipes. By my logic (which is most likely to be wrong... :/) if i created another network, and assigned it to my computer, it *should* make the router split up our packets and make our internet access faster.

Now, since i don't have any degree in Networking, i'd like to ask you:
*) Is my line of thought correct?
*) How could i set up my router (Aolink DRQ814Q) to have a 2nd network?

Thanks

 

[EricNau]

It probably will not help.

While it's true that dividing a network into two subnets can prevent packet collisions, I doubt that's your problem. You're internet is many times slower than your router; if you're having slowdowns it's most probably due to your bandwidth, which subnets won't alter.

 

[Keytachi]

well it was worth a shot... i guess ill just have to deal with my brother nagging me all the time by unplugging his ethernet cable...

 

[LANz]

Get a linksys router and run DD-WRT firmware on it, it will let you prioritize HTTP over torrents/downloading so that surfing will still be quick even though you download.

This does not work perfectly but usually well enough, you can do this on many "normal" routers as well but it dosent work as well.

 

[Consultant]

No. Useless.
Even if you set it up, whatever that slows down your connection (say torrents), will still slow it down.

Other possibilities
Different ethernet cable
Router reboot
Router firmware upgrade
wifi (check interference)
New router

 

[ElectricSheep]

Get a linksys router and run DD-WRT firmware on it, it will let you prioritize HTTP over torrents/downloading so that surfing will still be quick even though you download.

This does not work perfectly but usually well enough, you can do this on many "normal" routers as well but it dosent work as well.

If you can, get a linux based linksys router (either an older WRT54G, or a WRT54GL). These routes have much more memory and lend themselves better for running dd-wrt.

DD-Wrt will let you set up different QoS rules that can shape traffic in real-time. You can apply these rules to specific IP addresses, MAC addresses, or even specific ethernet jacks as well as specific protocol types. You can use these rules to cap the bandwidth available to your brother.

 

[giffut]

If ...

... you run torrent software, you probably have unlimited upload set up in its preferences. Try to limit the upload capacity of your torrent software to, say, 20% of your real existing maximum upload (e.g. I have 100KByte/s max, so my torrent software gets a 20KByte/s limit). Do also limit the amount of connections this software can initialize. Don´t go over 400 (that´s my experience with a couple of routers). The torrent software otherwise will completely eat up your upload capacity which slows your browsing to a crawl, as the upload for page requests is hardly funtional and therefore pretty slow. With many connections open, it even might crash the router.

You also wouldn´t need to utilize a router for different subnets, if you just have a couple of computers connected: Enter the network settings manually into those, but connect all your network machinery via a simple ethernet switch, including the router. Keep the router for spreading the internet to the computers which are supposed to be online. The switch easily will deliver the different subsets accordingly. Minimize DHCP use only to the internet network - as you very likely will only connect new machines their temporarily.

 

[hmmfe]

If you get a "real" router, you could use ACLs to limit bandwidth from certain IP addresses (or subnets), port numbers, etc. There are also some firewalls out there that do a good job of rate limiting based on access rules. These devices are a good bit more expensive than your typical consumer router. So, I'm not sure if that is an option for you. As an alternative (and fairly good learning experience) you could setup a spare PC and install one of the many linux router distributions out there. You would then have good rate-limiting capabilities.