AP Default Service flow L2 rate limiting

All, We are considering to do rate limiting on customer traffic on router sub-interfaces and allow the CPE’s to connect to the AP at a default rate.: Example CPE connected to AP on a default service flow of 10mbps but the vlan/ subinterface of its gateway ratelimits it to 3mbps. Even though the actual bandwidth is being limited by the router will the AP be overwhelmed with all CPE’s connected at a default high data rate serviceflow?

Note: Each cpe will have designated VLAN for data with /30 IP addressing with bandwidth being limited per sub-interface on the router.

This sounds fine to me as long as your QoS profiles are best-effort. If you try to do anything more “guaranteed” than that then the whole thing will probably fall on it’s face. Note however that if you try to do QoS for gaming, VoIP, etc this may not work out right. You also need to be aware that the rate limiting on the router works great for well-behaved TCP applications but a broadcast storm or any UDP traffic attempting a high rate will indeed take up all bandwidth you’re allowing on the AP.

Why are you considering just going with the default service flows? And where on earth did you get that many IP addresses? (Privates? IPv6? University?)

We are getting a new block soon and management wanted it to be more point to point based for customers rather than how it is now (flat). As far as you comments about the broadcast storm wouldnt the VLANS and CPE isolation help with containing that? Yes got it about the QoS which wouldnt be passed on end-end from network to AP etc.

VLANs and CPE isolation will keep broadcast traffic away from between subs, sure. However since there is effectively no rate limiting on the SM before TX time, there’s nothing stopping CPE from hammering the AP with 10 Mbps of junk. Anything like UDP or misbehaving TCP (or a good ol’ fashioned router hooked up wrong) will totally saturate upload land until it gets to your router that’s doing the traffic shaping.

Are you serving business customers with these /30s? Most people here with residential subscribers route something like a /24 to the AP and use SM isolation to keep them apart or run PPPoE. (PPPoE or even a flat subnet in a /24 wastes about 1.2% of the addresses versus /30s wasting 75% of your IP space)