Get router or computer to share bandwidth equally amongst applications

16Mbps is available via my cable-based ISP. When FileZilla is used to download a movie or television show via FTP, all 16Mbps of bandwidth are used. This is the expected and desired behavior.

The problem is that other network apps that are running in parallel with the download are left with virtually zero bandwidth. Whether that secondary application be a browser on the same machine, an Ethernet-connected AppleTV on the same network, or a guest browsing wirelessly on his laptop, virtually no bandwidth is available for the duration of the FileZilla download.

What I would (perhaps naively) expect to happen is:

(1) If the AppleTV requires 2Mbps to do it's job, it would get it's 2Mbps and the FileZilla download would be degraded to 14Mbps.

(2) If ten people entered my house and all started downloading from the Internet, each one of them would have access to 1.6 Mbps (16 Mbps divided by 10 people).

But this isn't what happens at all. The FileZilla download somehow consumes all external bandwidth that's available to the network.

Shouldn't my LinkSys E1000 router be able to give each outbound TCP/IP connection it's own share of the bandwidth? I double-checked the router settings and QOS functionality is turned off.

** I realize that I could artificially cap FileZilla's bandwidth usage in the user settings but that's not what I want. If FileZilla is the only app running on the network, it truly should have access to all 16Mbps. It feels like it's the router that should be responsible for giving each app its fair share but maybe that's just not how routers work? Please help.

Shouldn't my LinkSys E1000 router be able to give each outbound TCP/IP connection it's own share of the bandwidth? I double-checked the router settings and QOS functionality is turned off.

No. The router has no control over what packets your ISP puts on the wire to you. QoS won't give it control over that.

It feels like it's the router that should be responsible for giving each app its fair share but maybe that's just not how routers work?

No, that's not how routers work. Your router just routes the packets it receives from the rest of the world. It has no control over what it receives or how data gets put on the wire from your ISP to your router.

No significant effort has been put into make residential Internet access support any notion of "fairness" within the available bandwidth for an individual customer. There do exist some routers that fake it with technologies like StreamBoost, but they are the exception.