Observe and administer the traffic on your network

Traffic Shaper XP shows all active data in a network such as the used packages that are sent, protocols, the direction and speed of the transfers, the IP, the connection time, MAC Id’s, the name of the domains, ports and used network adapters, etc. With this information, network administrators can identify any issues that may be causing problems or strange behaviour.

The other fundamental part of the program consists in creating a series of norms to regulate the traffic. This way, you can give priority and more bandwidth access to to a series of programs or types of connection. For this, Traffic Shaper XP has an excellent assistant which helps you manage this task.

One drawback you may find with Traffic Shaper XP however is that it may conflict with your firewall. The developers claim that it supports all major firewall and server software although they cannot guarantee that every server will be supported. However, on the plus side, even if your network has no server or gateway computer it is it still possible to limit clients with Traffic Shaper XP. It supports Server-Free Mode which allows you to distribute bandwidth evenly for all users, even without a server computer.

This is a great little admin tool for those daunted by network management although it lacks advanced protocol analysing tools for major networks.

Traffic Shaper XP is a free bandwidth limiter for Windows 2000, XP and 2003 Server. It combines high performance traffic shaping with the ease of use and flexibility to keep your network free of congestion.

It features speed limiting for bandwidth-intensive applications and protocols, flexible address and port filtering, acknowledgement prioritization to speed up congested links
and real-time traffic monitoring and stream statistics.