Dividing up bandwidth on an Internet connection?

Can Internet service delivered by a single vendor to a single
residence be electronically subdivided into separate channels
delivered to several individual users, with fixed and pre-specified
ratios between the bandwidths delivered to each individual user?

[I don't need a detailed answer to the this question at this point,
but I'd like to know if it makes any sense with normally available
Internet routers and related hardware.]

To be more specific, suppose I have a residence with a primary living
area plus three separate rental studios. Into this residence comes an
Internet connection, delivered let's say by Comcast or some similar
vendor. The bandwidth of this connection is claimed by the vendor to
be, let's say for round numbers, 100 Mb/s, and it actually delivers
something close to this a reasonable fraction of the time.

Is there some way I can split this service at the point of entry with
some appropriate hardware so that, at least when things are working
well and the external connection is delivering full bandwidth, each
tenant will get a 10 Mb/s connection and I'll get a 70 Mb/s
connection? -- and beyond that, so that none of us will be able to get
more than our assigned bandwidth even if others are currently offline,
nor will any user be able externally drag down the data rate seen by
any of the others?

[It would also be desirable for each of these four sub-networks to be
protected against incursions from any of the others, so that they
operate like four individually private password-protected subnetworks,
with me of course knowing all four passwords -- or at least having
full access to the equipment that's splitting out these connections.]

I've not thought about the messier question of how this bandwidth
splitting might be designed and made to work if the primary service
bandwidth were to drop substantially for a while -- e.g., if the 100
Mb/s degrades substantially, maybe the system then drops all four
hannel rates proportionally until they get down to 3, 3, 3 and 21
Mb/s, after which the 3s are clamped at that level and the 21
continues dropping.

I don't recall seeing any discussion of systems like this. Are "data
bandwidth splitters", as contrasted to "signal frequency splitters",
readily available at the retail level?

On Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:42:44 -0700, AES <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Can Internet service delivered by a single vendor to a single
>residence be electronically subdivided into separate channels
>delivered to several individual users, with fixed and pre-specified
>ratios between the bandwidths delivered to each individual user?

Sure. See "bandwidth management" or "bandwidth manager".
<http://www.antamediabandwidth.com>
<http://www.softperfect.com/products/bandwidth/>
<http://www.antamedia.com/bandwidth-manager/>
<http://bandwidthcontroller.com>
<http://www.easyfp.com/bandwidth-manager>
etc, and plenty more.

Some cheapo routers and alternative firmware for routers (i.e. DD-WRT)
have this feature built in. I'm too lazy to look right now.
Oops... that feature is not free in DD-WRT:
<http://shop.dd-wrt.com/shop/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=31>

Bandwidth management is different from QoS (quality of service) which
simply guarantees that a specific application or user has sufficient
bandwidth by delaying other applications or users packets.

You need to have some way to identify users and restrict their
available bandwidth based on some identifier. If you decide to have a
separate PC doing the bandwidth management, you might want to add a
RADIUS server and have everyone login with a username and password.
This way, you don't need to know where they are located, or which way
they are connected, just who they are. A RADIUS server is also a big
improvement to wireless security.


--
Jeff Liebermann (E-Mail Removed)
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558