ADSL Bandwidth Management HOWTO Dan Singletary

Introduction
The purpose of this document is to suggest a way to manage outbound traffic on an ADSL (or cable modem) connection to the Internet. The problem is that many ADSL lines are limited in the neighborhood of 128kbps for upstream data transfer. Aggravating this problem is the packet queue in the ADSL modem which can take 2 to 3 seconds to empty when full. Together this means that when the upstream bandwidth is fully saturated it can take up to 3 seconds for any other packets to get out to the Internet. This can cripple interactive applications such as telnet and multi-player games.