I'm looking for a software QoS solution that allows me to automatically activate and deactivate the QoS at certain times.

To explain a bit what exactly I need, let me give you some background information. We're a post-production company, providing production telecine services to a movie production here in Australia. The daily rushes are put onto our FTP-server and picked up from the US. The problem here is the rather large time difference between the States and here. For earlier productions, the data was transferred after hours, so there was no problem guaranteeing a certain bandwidth, since the link was pretty idle that time anyway. While this was working fine, there was a rather large delay between shooting the footage and viewing it in the States. To avoid these delays, we need to send the stuff during our business hours. This is where the problem starts. Our client wants us to guarantee 5Mbit/s bandwidth for the downloads (we're talking about rather large chuncs of data here) between the hours of 9am and 11am. Since I don't want to limit our own bandwidth for the entire time of the production, I need a solution, that can activate the QoS at 9am and deactivate it again at 11am.

Any ideas guys?

Traffic shaping can be done with the `tc` set of tools. See also http://lartc.org/howto/, chapter 9.