A few router questions

[sb]

My P.O.S. router died yesterday and I'm looking to replace it with a better one that, if possible has better control capabilities. I share an apartment with two other people, one of whom is a gamer (mostly but not limited to fps online), the other is utorrent and limewire junkie, and I play mmo's. With our old router the gamer and I would occasionally clash if we were both playing, but it was easy to fix as usually either one of us re-logging into said game would clear up any issue. However when third roommate kicks up utorrent or limewire(a nightly occurrence), it had the potential to pretty much disable either of us two from the connection (forget about games, simple websites would load slower than in the 56k era). For reference, I am on the cheapest available high speed cable connection in a city area.

Basically my questions are:
1. Is there a way to partition or limit a users bandwidth through the router, and if so are there any specific routers with this capability. My old P.O.S. router this wasn't possible. Getting the roommate to limit his downloading/uploading is somewhat out of the question, it would be a better situation if it could be controlled externally.

2. /g or /n or does it make a difference? /n seems to bump up the price and performance of the router(though not sure why/how) to the next bracket, but I'm wondering if /n is needed for this intended use or if /n is something more specific to bigger network (offices and such).

3. I'm running Mac OS, so while most routers are use compatible, being able to properly program it from my computer might still be an issue.

4. Any router out there that you all might recommend? The three people who need to connect are pretty much within 20 feet of the router and 2 of the three are wireless, so one person (utorrent/limewire person) needs to physically connect.

Anyway, thanks for any input or help you all might have.

[Cephius]

There are routers that allow you to limit bandwidth to certain users, but honestly it's so much easier to just have your roommate limit his bandwidth usage (its a feature on utorrent itself for crying out loud) you should drill it in his head to do that. When a user is capping out your upload bandwidth, you can't download any pages, and it causes the slowness that you're describing. Have your roommate cap his upload to like... 3/4 of your upload capacity and it should leave more than enough capacity to play your MMOs and the online games.

N-band networking has a higher bandwidth capacity and longer range, but it requires the special N-routers and N-recievers on your computers. The standard ones won't work. Unless you're going to be far from the router, or if you have high bandwidth requirements (>10Mbit) there's no need to pick it over G.

As for routers.. I like the WRT54G (the older model) some people hate it, others love it, but it works fine for me.