Trying to throttle users hooked into my router.

Question

I own a coffee shop that offers free wi-fi. We have some customers that come in and use up all the bandwidth. I think they are doing some P2P stuff. It slows down the internet for all the other customers and makes it difficult to proIs there a way to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth per user using the AEBS? If not, does anyone have any other ideas?

Answer 1

And now that you are on it, return (if you still can) your AEBS, since you can purchase a good firewall/router that, if installed correctly, can even give you per connection usage that you can use to bill your users, if necessary.
You can even establish QoS so that some protocols (like P2P) only get a preset amount of bandwidth (if you don't want to shut them off completely). In fact, having only a few ports open may open more opportunities for customer complaints. It is better, in my opinion, to manage the traffic rather than forbidding it.
One more thing - you may want to add some type of content filtering. Offering wireless may open you to some liabilities depending on what your customers download. I am not a lawyer, but I'd at least take steps like using OpenDNS (which most people recommend, anyway) and using their filtering categories.
In any case, the AEBS becomes redundant in your configuration.
Message was edited by: Paklonder