I need a router that I can throttle bandwidth based on the internal/local IP.  My kids drive me fucking nuts with their fucking tablets.  I want to be able to throttle bandwidth by IP address on my local network.  Ideally by speed.  So I could set IP 1 to a max bandwidth of 1MB for example, or IP 2 to 500KB etc.  My current router only offers limited shaping by application.   Unfortunately, it tends to give high bandwidth to exactly what I don't want getting it.


Anyone recommend such a creature?

You seek a router with dynamic QOS. No recommendation on specific models sorry.

Asus

would a netlimiter work?

I know that Ubiquiti's Unifi line of products can do it. I only have their wireless access points. You can create user groups and assign connected clients to different user groups with certain bandwidth allowances. If I added a switch or the gateway, I would bet that it would work with wired connections as well.

But, getting into all of that stuff is pretty expensive from a consumer standpoint. If you only needed to limit wireless devices, you could buy a Ubiquiti wireless access point and do it that way (starts from ~$80 on Amazon Unifi UAP AC Lite).

Does your current router capable of having a guest network? If so, there may be a bandwidth limiting function for the guest network and have the tablets connect to that.

Also, sometimes these things require a static IP mapping for each device before you can set a bandwidth limitation in case the DHCP server assigns a different device the original IP address.

Look at building or buying a router loaded with the (free) third-party DD-WRT firmware.  Looks like it will do what you ask under the QOS settings.

what kind of terrible internet do you have that you have to use QOS?



btw I use a Watchguard T70 @ home it does exactly what you want but it is also hilariously expensive (not an humble brag I got mine from the WG beta program for free)

you could also look into the tons of devices that support a custom firmware like DD-WRT which basically takes any crap router and makes it not suck (and provides the features you're looking for)

Mikrotik Router OS, Simple Queues

I've actually got a few devices at my home limited by bandwidth. Think I'm doing it via MAC address though instead of IP.

Great suggestions so far.   Thanks.

It's possible your existing router firmware could be changed to DD-WRT. I did that to a router I had and it was a lot better than it was. I got a ASUS and they use a skin of DD-WRT from what I understand, they look very similar at least. 

I have an Asus RT-AC3100 and like it a lot.  I use the QOS bandwidth limiting per device and it works very well.

Time Warner 60mb.  A single Steam download stream will knock any game sessions off the Internet.  A single YouTube stream hits 15mb.  Not even sure what my 4k TV hits.
We were having contention problems with 2 kids on YouTube and me trying to play a game.  So...  QOS to the rescue.  I limit the kids devices to 10mb each.  Problem solved.  Games stay online.

This is where th simplicity of meraki works well but it's $$$. 

My TWC 50M service went to 75M once Spectrum came to be as Spectrum "doesn't support services under 100M". I noticed Youtube/Netflix/Hulu were getting really bad about pulling as much bandwidth as possible to buffer the entire movie/show back when I had a 12M connection so I ended up throttling devices to 5M (since at the time all I had were 720p TVs). Now I keep it throttled to 10M for all TVs and it seems to handle things fairly well.

You can throttle steams download speeds I think

You can, but my kids would inevitably mess with it.  Router-level gives me more control.