[Stealth22]

What sort of equipment do you mean, when you say "switches" and "routers"? Is it the consumer grade stuff, or are we talking enterprise level equipment?

If you're not an IT guy, I would highly recommend consulting with Shaw/Telus/whoever your ISP is, or have someone who is a tech guy look into this. And that's not me being rude or condescending, don't get me wrong. But networking can be a balancing act, and if you don't know what you're doing, have the wrong equipment, or just have your equipment set up incorrectly, it can slow everything down to molasses.

Without knowing the exact specifics of your setup, it's difficult to say what the issue is...and networking isn't even my area of expertise either. I know enough to run my home network, and I know enough to be dangerous when it comes to complicated stuff. But I'm a developer, not a networking guy, so if I have an issue, I usually call on a friend or coworker to help.

I'd be happy to help you in any way that I can, but we'd need to have more details first, especially into the kind of equipment you are using.

How were you limiting the bandwidth to each unit? QoS (quality of service...basically prioritizing different types of network traffic) can do wonders to limit bandwidth-eating requests, but if set up incorrectly, can also make the network really unstable.

From what you're saying, it sounds like (in my 'enough to be dangerous' opinion) limiting the bandwidth on each line should help. But again, it depends on the equipment that you have, and it needs to be tuned correctly.

Also, when you say that it ends up being slow for everyone, what sort of speeds do people get? And are these slowdowns strictly on wireless, or on wired connections as well? You're right in that if you just have the whole thing as a 'free for all', one guy torrenting is going to use all of the available bandwidth. It will not simply split equally across all lines, unless your switches are actually limiting the traffic on each port.