I’m seeing torrent users suck up literally all the bandwidth available to my Balance 380, pretty much shutting out everyone else. Although I can dump the specific users into the ‘Guest’ group to throttle them (or block them altogether via firewall), identifying them requires tedious monitoring of the Active Sessions and Client lists. How about adding a feature to limit torrent traffic to either 1) a percentage of total bandwidth, or 2) lowest priority of all traffic types, or 3) blocking it altogether? I know that identifying torrent traffic is not straightforward, what with random ports, etc., but there are some pretty obvious characteristics:
Client maintains high, rather steady download rate over time.
Client’s download/upload rate are close to equal.
Client maintains a high number of persistent connections.
The bulk of the Client’s connections are to addresses scattered randomly all over the planet.
These are the criteria I use to identify torrent hogs, and so far, no one has screamed ‘FOUL!’ due to my blocking their legitimate non-torrent activity. It would be a real time (and bandwidth) saver if the Balance could do the monitoring/throttling for us.
Thank you for your information. We do have BitTorrent blocking features on our Balance 580 and up currently. We would certainly be able to offer you our trade-up program to upgrade you to a B580 and that should definitely help to address the issue at hand.
I guess I assumed from the naming convention (B380, B580…) that the B380 was in the same class as the B580 and would have, aside from the number of WAN ports, the same capabilities. Is this an issue of hardware limitations (processing power, RAM…) or simply a marketing decision designed to encourage trade-ups? I’m in an area where getting even two somewhat high speed connections is a stretch. Not much point in having two more WAN ports that are unlikely to ever be used. If the B380 has the power, might you consider offering the additional filtering capabilities as an option, via one-time fee or yearly subscription?
Just to be explicit on this Beta feature. This is not truly a “throttle” but rather the Peer-to-Peer blocking feature will block Bittorret/eDonkey traffic (roughly 80-90 percent of the traffic has been shown in internal testing but your mileage will vary in actual deployments). The blocking is not IP or Port based but rather relying on Bittorrent file signatures.
Again, if you’re still interested in unlocking this feature, go ahead and open a support ticket and we can get you the instructions to unlock for your B580 and up (as long as you are on current firmware)