If you are worried about sky-rocketing Internet data usage charges over your Wi-Fi network or you are facing speed lags or short of bandwidth problem as there are plenty of users on the single network. Then this is the time to keep a tab on Internet data usage and limit the speed of it. Due to many users and plenty of devices attached to your Wi-Fi network it causes various problems. To deal with this situation, you can consider limiting Internet usage and limit speed on the wireless network. Let’s discuss some of these steps in this article.
Use a router to limit Internet usage: This is useful security precaution for your network to configure your system router to set limitations on using the Internet on shared platforms. Putting restrictions on Internet usage include allowing designated devices to access the router’s network, setting day and time limitations when the device is connected to the router. Putting these restrictions, you can keep a tab on Internet data usage effectively. To do this, follow these steps.
- Launch a Web browser on your system and enter router’s IP address in the address bar. Check router’s manual for details on its default IP address.
- Enter the username and password and access the router’s Control Panel.
- Go to control panel and click on “Access Restrictions” link and click on the checkbox to “Enable” the access restrictions settings.
- Now enter the Media Access Controller (MAC) address of each system (which are sharing your router’s network). To find MAC addresses of systems, go to “Attached Devices” section in the system router’s control panel.
- Click on the “Apply” button to save the restriction settings. Depending upon the make and model of your router, the device may reboot itself before reloading the control panel.
- Go to Control Panel and click on the “Schedule” button and click on the check boxes next to the days you want restrictions to be active. You can also enter start and end time for each day.
- To save the restrictions schedule settings clock on “Apply” button again.
Utilize router’s QoS to distribute bandwidth: Quality-of-Service or QoS feature is useful enough to control bandwidth usage to ensure good network performance. It is useful with many sensitive types of services like VoIP calls, video streams, online gaming etc. It helps you distribute bandwidth to different services according to their priority like a high priority to heavy resource services compared to less sensitive services like downloads, software updates, web browsing etc.
The exact Quality-of-Service features and settings may vary according to router brand and models but most of them provide a basic way to give higher priority to particular devices by tagging their Media Access Controller (MAC) or IP address. Some router devices come with a set of collection of default QoS settings which you can change and customize. To set services according to their priority, login to the router and check QoS settings. Now check default settings to check if some services are a higher priority. If not, check if it allows to segregate traffic based on the service type and go that route first to deal with any performance issue on the network. Secondly, you can prioritize certain devices as a higher priority.
Optimize your network to manage speed: In this step, you can consider connecting your system or devices to router or network via an Ethernet cable. It will help you alleviate the congestion on the airwaves. For other devices and systems which can’t be hardwired, try to connect them on router’s 5GHz frequency band for higher resource services. For low resource services, you can connect them to the 2.4GHz network. For those devices, which can only connect to 2.4GHz network consider checking channel usage so that you can use the least-crowded channel available. Also, ensure you are on WPA2 security for your Wi-Fi as older generation WPA may affect wireless speed.
You can follow these simple steps to monitor your Internet data usage and keep a limit on the speed of different devices. Following these steps, you can use your router’s services at its best. It also allows you optimum use of Internet services on your Wi-Fi network without any hassle.
Summary: There are plenty of steps which determine your Internet data usage and help you limit the speed of it. In this article, we can discuss some of these steps here.
