I am located in a rural area and receive my high speed Internet via line of sight wireless through a Cisco Aironet 350 Bridge. The distance is about 3 miles from my antenna to the transmitter. The ISP makes no restriction on speed so often my speeds are as high as 1500 kbps download and 1200 upload. I would guess that bandwidth averages around 750. By the nature of the network, other users on the system are able to hog the bandwidth so that my download bandwidth drops drastically. For example, when the local kids get home from school and begin downloading music I see a visible drop in bandwidth.

My problem is that some individuals use certain programs which totally hog the bandwidth reducing me to dial up speeds. This totally kills my online gaming instantly. If it happens during ISP office hours, after three or four calls to the ISP, they will send an email to the offender telling him to stop and threatening to cut off service. So, those who run the bandwidth hog programs have learned to come online at random times in the evening after the ISP office is closed. My badwidth immediately drops to under 100 kbps and I am done for. And, that is when I am usually deep into the game and find myself frozen out.

The easy answer is to switch to another ISP. The key word here is rural. There is no other ISP option and there is no DSL or cable.

The question is what can I do about it?
1) Is there a way that I can take the bandwidth back to get my own rightful share of bandwidth?
2) Failing that, is there a way that I can use so much bandwidth that it kills the stream for everybody and forces the ISP to pay attention in the evenings and find the offenders?
3) Which program do you think that bandwidth hogs are using to so effectively hog all of the bandwidth?
4) Any other suggestions for a desperate gamer?

Is there any way you can track/log/chart those hogs? If so, run/do a study over a reasonable amount of time and then email the results to the ISP. I'm not sure if there is any "min to max" pipe software that gives you a fixed "tunnel" to the ISP. This would be more difficult with wireless than cable/DSL to my mind. I could be wrong. Have you tried an online search for solutions? I guess my next guestion why is your "pipe" impinged when they come on? I.E. why does you/your system give up bandwidth to them?

The problem here is it's a shared connection - Many connections to 1 access point. Only the ISP can control that. To verify where the bottleneck is (and as proof for the ISP), run a traceroute to yahoo.com (tracert www.yahoo.com at the command prompt.) You should see the ping return times increasing at the bottleneck, usually the default gateway - which is the access point 3 miles away. If this proves to be the case, then you can put the traceroute into a logfile to send the the ISP as proof (tracert www.yahoo.com >>C:\tracelog.txt).

There is 1 that comes to mind...

LINKY

I run this with an uncapped DSL line with my own bandwidth...

Nailed it.

If you don't control the AP, there's not a thing you can do (that's legal).

Finding a contact at the ISP (something above the basic phone support person) (this assumes the ISP is more than one person/a mom and pop operation) is the only solution.
They can(should already be) run usage logs 24/7, looking for users who regularly exceed "normal/resonable usage" and contact them.
This is really to their advantage (a small operation doesn't want to lose/cut off ANY paying customer, but if makes the service useless to all other customers, they are likely to lose more revenue in the long run) They may also need to impliment some sort of CAP .
you'd be better off with a constant 500/500Kbps connection then an uncapped but unrealiable 1500/1200~100/100~0/0 plan