We are looking at other ways to sell bandwidth. Looking at the big guys and how their speeds are all over the map during peak times, but you seem to get a decent chunk of the pie during peak times is interesting as a business model.
What if you sell up to 30 mbps with a CIR of 2 mbps, leave all the SM's at unlimited throttling. That way if a customer is one of the only users on the AP sucking down bandwidth, they would see the 30 mbps. Makes them happy to see very fast speeds during non peak times. Obviously, during peak times, 7pm to 12 am, they would be guaranteed their 2 mbps. Kind of like what Verizon and ATT do in bigger cities.
- Has anyone done something like this? Does it work well?
- How well does the AP handle load balancing as subscribers use the available wireless bandwidith? We would like to stack AP's to lower the overall SM count on each AP to keep the CIR within available bandwidth. Say, put max 40 users on each AP at 2 mbps CIR.
- If one of the stacked AP's fails and the SM's jump to the other one, what happens if the CIR is greater than the sum of the AP?
Honestly in the senario you are talking about I would not utilize CIR. I would have the AP load balance as best it can and offer BE (Best Effort) services.
CIR is more a tool for dedicated accounts like T1 replacement or phone system trunks. Understand that if everyone has a CIR then it is basicly like no one has CIR as the system loads up and there is contention for the resources if everyone is equal / CIR accounts then there will be no priority routing of the resources and it is the same as if you didn't have CIR.
So in the BE senerio the adding of additional resources to maintain the bandwidth at what ever level you are confrotable with is how we currently run our system.