lmnopt 0 Newbie Poster

Hi there,

I've recently had an idea which I would like implement across my home network and was wondering if anyone could tell me

  1. Is it possible
  2. How would one go about doing it

So, recently I have been having a problem of going over my peak data usage allowance at home, the problem isn't so much that I need a bigger plan its that my peak data allowance is only 8gb while my off peak data allowance is 92gb. Normally I can make sure that I only download large files in the off peak times while during peak times I can check emails and such but not do to much, the problem is that every month for a while now myself and my family have been going way over the 8gb peak allowance, this in term restricts the speed of access to 64k, even during non-peak times.

My idea to solve this problem was to set up a timed data quota on the network, so that during peak times if 7.9gb was used the internet would simply cut out and no access would be allowed at peak times until the next month, or even to wait until it gets to 6gb and the restrict the speed manually to prevent it going over the peak allowance.

Now, the problems:

  1. I have a fairly low end router which cannot do this sort of thing, and I don't know of any router that can do this sort of thing.
  2. I have 8 computers connected the network so installing software on each computer simply wouldn't work as I couldn't simply divide the usage into 8 as the are shared between 3 people unevenly so it wouldn't work out to be fair, unless I only allowed 3 computers to access the internet, which wouldn't work anyway.

So my solution to this was to possibly use one of those computers and convert it into a server, through which all traffic must pass in order to access the internet, similar to a proxy server, but to have that computer restrict the access during certain times after a certain amount of data has been used in a certain time period.

So I would quite like to know if anyone has any ideas how I might go about doing this, ie. any software which I can use which can restrict internet access, it would be incredibly helpful.

Sorry about the excessively long post,
Thanks for any help