NetBalancer is an Internet traffic monitoring and controlling software that is available as a free and professional version. The professional version is available for free today only at the Giveaway of the Day website; Hence the review.

The NetBalancer website describes the differences between the free and professional version of the traffic shaping and monitoring software this way:

*The Free version is limited to a maximum of 5 process priorities/limits and 5 rules at a time, has no separate network adapters management and no support for Network Grouping

NetBalancer’s core features include:

• Set custom upload and download speeds for individual system processes.
• Set download and upload priorities
• Manage both limits and priorities for individual network adapters
• Group local network computers and balance their traffic
• Global traffic limits
• Display all connections and traffic for all system processes

Installation of the software should not pose a problem. Users who install the Giveaway of the Day version should however take note of the optional Software Informer installation at the end which is not needed for NetBalancer’s functionality.

When you start the program for the first time you will see a list of all processes that are currently running on the system along with their process id, incoming and outgoing traffic, cpu, path and traffic history.

Each process can be selected to see additional information about it and all of its existing connections.

A right-click on any process in the listing displays a context menu with options to modify that processes’ upload and download priority. Depending on that priority, the process gets more or less of the network capacities in high load situations.

Say you want to make sure that you can play your favorite online game just fine while at the same time downloading files via Bittorrent or ftp. You could set the priority of the game process to high to make sure that it gets enough capacities to keep the game playable even if another process is requesting most of the available bandwidth.

Rules are a powerful way of prioritizing traffic further. They can be used to change priorities or download and upload limits for a process permanently or for specific days or times.

You could use rules to reduce the priority of P2P traffic during Workdays and hours for instance.

The program options can be used to customize the program further, for instance by configuring at which percentage the network balancing kicks in, by giving automatic high priority to focused applications or by editing the level severity which sets the speed differences between applications with different network priorities.

The free version of the traffic shaping software NetBalancer is available from the developer website as well.

This brings up some interesting moral but also legal questions. Website owners have no idea, and obviously no control, that ads are displayed on their websites. The problem here is that they probably do not have the means to verify that ads are displayed either unless someone would come up with a log that showed which websites have been affected by this practice. Customers however are on the other end of the spectrum. Their traffic is meddled with and are shown ads that are probably specifically targeted to increase the success rate.

Some ISP names have been published by the researchers already: RedMoon, Mesa Networks, MetroFi and XO Communications with the last being one of the largest ISPs in the country and only in that list because of a smaller reseller according to an XO spokesman. It will be interesting to access the full list of Internet Service Providers that inject ads in websites without their customers consent.

Update: The topic of injecting ads into websites that their customers visit has really caused that much of a public outcry than it should have. Most newspapers and news agencies, even technology related ones, have not covered ad injection by Internet Service Providers ever since it first became known.