Home bandwidth monitoring - Linksys WRT54GL / DLink 502T

Internet connection at home is provided via DSL/PSTN connected to DLink 502T connected to Linksys WRT54GL v1.1.

Given some of my previous experiences regarding internet bandwidth at home (ref 1 & 2),
I need bandwidth monitoring software - one that gives me current upload/download information as well as historical trending information. Unfortunately neither DLink nor Linksys provide this in their official software/firmware.

Linksys WRT54GL firmware from Tomato, DD-WRT and OpenWRT all of these seem to provide bandwidth monitoring.

Incidentally, I chatted up Linksys support today. And while they were quite helpful and gracious, they didn't have any solution to this other than to state that this is supported only on 3rd party firmware, but running 3rd party firware will void warranty :) There was no option for them to take a feature request from customer. I'm sure this is a much required/requested feature for most customers who buy home broadband wireless routers. But without official support, it's kinda stuck.


Does anyone have any suggestions or good experience with any of these without having bricked their hardware? :)

Aritel Download Speed Test - Something fishy?

I tried out download speed tests and there's something I'm either missing or fishy.

Airtel & SpeedTest.net are indicating that my download speeds are at 2Mbps.

PCPitStop, DSLReports, TestMy.net are reporting that I'm at 0.2Mbps!

That's a whopping difference.

(PCPitStop, depending on the type of test, location of server, shows different results - this is probably truly representative of what can happen with others as well)

I can speculate some reasons why some of those appear faster than other, but when I tried download software (via browser, free download manager), it still remains at around 256kbps or .25Mbps.

See the results for yourself.

2Mbps speed results





0.2Mbps or ~256kbps speed results

Technology for sharing bandwidth

From a pure technical perspective, is it possible to share unused bandwidth available across multiple independent ADSL connections ?

Like, if I were in an apartment complex and everyone (or almost) had an unlimited 128/256kbps download ADSL connection from their service provider of choice, would it be possible in some way to share the total bandwidth across all interested parties ?

Note that I'm not getting into the clauses the service provider has for connections, I'm just looking at technical feasibility. Maybe someway of hooking up via some wireless mesh whereby everyone was guaranteed their "assured" bandwidth, but still was able to leverage if someone's else was not being used ? It may probably "break" the assumptions of connection pool sharing being taken into consideration by SPs, but that's another matter. For example, they may assume not more than 10% of their connections will be active online at a given point of time and purchase their backend bandwidth accordingly.

Note that I'm also not getting into issues like what is the incentive for someone to get into such shared connections, etc.

Thoughts, ideas, known solutions, ... ?

Known problems/legal constraints ?