checking traffic bandwidth on PACE gateway

[steve krause]

Is there a tool/application to examine the in and out traffic bandwidth going in and out of my home gateway? I am using the PACE gateway that Sonic provides.

I ask this because a couple times my connection seemed really broken. I called tech support -- such a please to be dealing with Sonic rather than ATT in the Philippines.... -- and we figured out that my upload speed was maxing out. The reason for that turned out that I had taken a five minute movie on my smart phone and the 500mg file was in the middle of a large upload to Dropbox.

It took Sonic tech support to tell me that something was doing uploading because I didn't notice it on my smart phone. I do have a real simple Netpersec program on my PCs that can tell me what the PCs are doing but I'd like to know what is going on at the router level.

Tech support did tell me that I could go to gateway.sonic.net and look in settings and check out the IP traffic numbers, doing a refresh after 60 seconds and calculate it from the numbers displayed. But I am looking for realtime graphic tool.

Is there some tool that I can use on the PACE device?... something easy to set up and understand would be helpful as I am not a network guy.

[cdkeen]

I found this tool: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Network-To ... itor.shtml

The description sounds like what you are asking for but I must disclaim I have never used this software and make no guarantee as to its' usefulness or functionality whatsoever. It was the most relevant thing I found in the brief search I conducted.

Also I found this page with a few more options you could review: http://softwaresolution.informer.com/Router-Monitor/

I hope this information is helpful!

[krauster]

I didn't try any of the tools recommended in the above post, but I still have some questions.

The issue is that I was thinking of putting all my Picasa photos into the google cloud (yes, maybe that is a stupid idea, but hey everyone's doing it, right?). The problem is that the upload completely clogs my connection. I have been told by Sonic tech support that they don't support the type of adjustments that I need to do to the Pace router that I am renting from Sonic, in order to make the upload traffic not clog the download traffic. I believe this is called a quality of service adjustment.

The upload is being controlled by some utility that Picasa launches and puts in the tray when I boot my Windows 7 computer. I have to disable it when I want to do anything with my internet connection through the Pace router. If the Picasa upload is running no other computers, or tablets or phones can browse through the router. Can someone explain the settings I should make to the Pace 4111N router?

[virtualmike]

Does the Picasa utility have a setting to limit the amount of upload bandwidth? The Google Music uploader (from the same company) has such a setting. Right click on the icon in the tray and look for a "Settings" or "Options" choice in the menu.

[Guest]

I remember using that setting in Google Play when I let google have all of my music collection. But I don't see that upload priority setting in Picasa. I think it is not in Picasa.

Plus maybe that setting wouldn't really help the router clog problem because even when Picasa was playing friendly within the Windows it is running on, wouldn't the other computers connected to the router be bogged down by Picasa when Picasa determines that the local Windows where it is running is wide open for full upload speed, or is that not how it works?

Anyway, I am still looking for how to change the router to limit bandwidth for the pPicasa upload.

[virtualmike]

Plus maybe that setting wouldn't really help the router clog problem because even when Picasa was playing friendly within the Windows it is running on, wouldn't the other computers connected to the router be bogged down by Picasa when Picasa determines that the local Windows where it is running is wide open for full upload speed, or is that not how it works?

Google Music Manager lets me choose:

Fastest possible
1024 kbps (Fast)
512 kbps (Medium)
256 kbps (Slow)
128 kbps (Slowest)

I set it to 512 kbps (which is about 1/2 of my available upload bandwidth). Others may wish to use different numbers depending on the bandwidth demands in their homes.