How in the Tech

Shape network traffic on a per application basis

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 22, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Networking, Windows

As our network bandwidth increases into our homes, we are always finding more ways to saturate the connection. The Internet knows no limits; even a few years back, no one could have imagined the possibilities as high-speed internet has opened the door to exciting opportunities. Today I can stream live television to my home theater PC over the Internet while participating in a VOIP conference call with colleagues from all over the world – all for $45 a month. I believe that’s pretty incredible, don’t you?

Still, our desire for more bandwidth never subsides. Quite likely you’ve come across circumstances where you are taxing the connection just a bit too much and things begin to stall and otherwise degrade to become unusable. Applications are constantly competing for your finite bandwidth – and they don’t always play fair. Streaming Youtube videos is highly bandwidth intensive but it doesn’t need to be so bursty – meaning, it doesn’t need to max your download speed so that you have a 5 minute buffer into the future; certainly not at the expense of latency being introduced into your XBox online experience.

Network prioritizing, or quality of service (QoS), is typically a feature of your home router. Unfortunately, it’s not the most user friendly even though great strides have been made in the last little while. If your home network is relatively simple with perhaps just two network devices, configuring QoS may be overkill to accomplish our traffic limits. Instead, a software-based approach may be more sensible.

NetBalancer is one such application for your traffic prioritizing needs. NetBalancer allows you to configure upload and download constraints on a per-application basis. During the same approach on a router generally requires knowing and understanding port numbers or network protocols. Downloading the latest podcasts is iTunes is important to me, but it’s not overly time sensitive. With NetBalancer, I can configure iTunes into a low priority queue which allows it to continue without interfering with more important network tasks – like perhaps streaming TV show off Hulu.

NetBalancer is available in free and pro versions for Windows, and while I typically don’t speak to paid applications; NetBalancer is worth a look. The free version limits it’s use to 5 configured applications which is not a bad compromise when you think about what all you wish to limit. Still, if you require more flexibility, the Pro version will set you back just $25.

Download NetBalancer