regulating bandwidth

Our office network has been experiencing some congestion lately because of the downloads of large files. Can anyone recommend an effective (although not extremely expensive) traffic shaper that could help us regulate some of these downloads? We don't mind if employees use our bandwidth (much of the use is wireless so they're using personal and office computers at times), but we need to keep it from affecting normal business functions when usage is high. There are about 80-100 people working in the office at a time.

Does your office already have a firewall? If so, perhaps it can be configured to allocate bandwidth more efficiently. We use the open source software http://www.smoothwall.org/, which has a mod that allows bandwidth regulating.

Hopefully your employees appreciate the access to the network for their personal business. That wouldn't fly a lot of places. Anyway, you should check out Netequalizer for your bandwidth issue. I've worked with several companies that have installed them and they seem to be pretty effective and worry free. Users will still be able to do their thing...until the network gets clogged. Then the shaping starts until the congestion subsides.

Too difficult for me...

Thanks, guys. We went with the NetEq. Good stuff. Gordman, it's not as hard as difficult as you'd think. Thanks again.

I wouldn't let do the firewall such a job, think that a router is more suited for this task (QoS, quality of service).

The reason is that specialized appliances do this "in hardware", while others have to software-emulate such features.

So if a typical router (there are exceptions) acts like an IPS (intrusion prevention), it must do this via its software. Most firewalls supporting this or even a specialized one have specially designed hardware that takes over most time-consuming tasks. And this increases network performance dramatically (or vice versa, slows it down when enabling a software-emulated feature).

However the cheapest solution is to prohibit personal Internet usage in the office (if this is the reason for the bandwidth usage).

NetEqualizer doesn't rely on a firewall. You're right about the easiest solution being to just not allow personal usage, but things are going smoothly since installing the neteq. box. If it hadn't worked, we might have cut the personal use out completely though.

Nice to sharing