Smart switches and individual rate control

[tachyon]

Hi all

I share a house with my girlfriend and a roommate, and we are all connected to a single 4Mb ADSL connection (the fastest available in my country). Broadband is brutally expensive here, so I'm looking to install a smart switch which will allow me to throttle individual ports equitably, preventing one person from hogging all the bandwidth.

I read Tim's excellent "Smart Switch How To" guides which were very informative. In his example he used a Netgear GS108T which provides the throttling functionality I need, but unfortunately the ingress rate control only has options for 512Kb, 2Mb and up. 512 is a little low, and 2Mb it too high.

Does anyone know what the rate control settings on other similar switches are (eg Linksys SLM2008, Dell PowerConnect 2808)? Several ingress settings below 2Mb would be ideal.

If there are other models you can suggest that would be great - I'd prefer a fanless unit cos it will sit near my desk, but it's not vital.

I would be grateful for any info you could provide ^_^

 

[thiggins]

Cisco SLM2005,2008 have only priority-based QoS, no port bandwidth control.

 

[tachyon]

Thanks for the info . So would something like the Linksys RV082 do the job? Under Bandwidth Management could I just set a port range from 1 to 65535 for each protocol for each user and impose reasonable downstream rates?

It's expensive (works out to around $590 here), and I wouldn't need the dual-WAN or VPN features - any other models you can recommend? If not I shall just have to cough up the cash

 

[thiggins]

If you're going to try a router, the EnGenius ESR9850 that I just reviewed is a much cheaper alternative. Up and download bandwidth rates are settable from 64 Kbps to 32 Mbps in 2X increments.