Activate Client only on low network activity?

[Borgs8472]

he title says it all.

I wish I could get more downloading in the day as oppossed to currently where I only bittorrent over night.

However I have a very busy house network and it's not fair me tying up the bandwidth all the time.

So would it be possibly somehow to get a client that pauses all on medium local network traffic, and resumes on very low network traffic?

That would be a very efficient use of my downloading time.

But how?

I see about 3 potential ways to begin doing this:

* Router
* Client
* 3rd Party Software

Router

For the router, I honestly don't think my home router could cut it. Ideally I'd want a complex rule whereby if the external packet flow is over a certain threshhold the downloading PC gets locked out of the router or similar.

Again, if it goes below a certain threshhold, it resumes.

I want a nice real cisco router.

( I will be doing my CCNA in a few weeks time, wish me luck! )

Client

Well I don't know one that does what I'm after, which isn't to say it doesn't exist however. Running capped constantly is no good for me, because other people in the house also torrent and need that upload bandwidth. I guess I don't know enough clients to analyse this any further.

Third Party Software

Hmm. Well obviously anti-virus/zone alarm type stuff is not going to be specific enough.... but maybe there's SOMETHING there. I don't know it. I would need a firewall that scans the local network promiscously for traffic, which opened and closed on certain criteria.

Unfortunately I've never heard of any software that can do that (though I would think it'd exist!), and I don't know what keywords to google for.

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So that's my problem, any ideas people?

[lifehacker]

You can configure a client to use up only a small amount of bandwidth. I know uTorrent has this option and Im pretty sure Azureus has it too.

[Borgs8472]

Oh sure, but the thing is I don't want permenently capped downloading, I want to max out my connection when the network's idle, and freeze it when there's other activity going on.