Anyone willing to share some ideas on Bandwidth sharing ratios?
How do you typically resell your bandwidth given that your upstream is a single T1?
- how many users would you allocate to it?
- what packages would you offer the client?
- any guarantees on minimum bandwidth?
- do you block/shape P2P, if so, how?
Thanks
The amount of bandwidth really doesn’t matter so much as your over subscription. The more over subscription the more money the less happy the customers. Finding this happy medium is going to be one of your first goals.
We started with a T1 in the USA with a 125 over subscription ratio 5 years ago. Now we are closer to 25 to 1 as our customer demands have increased. Some locations on our network we still do 50+ to 1.
We limit any single connection to our network to a limited number of simultaneous connections. We don’t care if they are P2P or 100 computers sitting behind a router. If you want more bandwidth / connections they pay more for it.
As far as guarantees it depends on your network design and target customer base. If you plan to invest in a solid multi-homed edge network connection with the appropriate backup power and resources and then design the rest of your network the same way with little to no over subscription then you can deploy a guaranteed bandwidth solution. If you answer no to any of the above. What good is your guarantee?
We got 80 users out of a T1 before it hit the wall selling 700/350k residential and 1.5M/750k business 4 years ago.
I agree that limiting the # of session and setting BW quotas is the way to go. You can spend alot of time and money trying to manage user BW which is moot now that P2P runs across port 80.
10% of your users will use 80% of your bandwidth - those are the ones to worry about. Utilizing bursting in the SM’s is an excellent way to increase the utilization of your T1. Allowing users to download small files and attachments quickly gets them off the network faster, and users downloading large files don’t hog the available bandwidth.
Marginal links will use more bandwidth due to re-transmits. Make sure all of your links are stable. Running links at 2X will also improve efficiency as the data is transmitted to the user twice as fast - again getting them off the network more quickly.
Thanks for the info. Do you use any particular appliance/software to limit connections, or is it part of your edge router config?
chrisopq wrote: Do you use any particular appliance/software to limit connections, or is it part of your edge router config?
we use Mikrotik RB1000 with Queues plus QoS on the SM (for bursting) even if you could do everything on the Mikrotik.
We use a Mikrotik for everything at the moment. You will not be able to manage the number of simultaneous connections from a location from the canopy sm, you will need that ability in your router.
A quality bandwidth shaping solution in your network will allow you to stretch your bandwidth much further.
There are many solutions, I have personally worked with a home grown linux HTB implementation, Mikrotik (linux with a easy front end), Allot Enforcer, NetEqualizer. Personally I found the easiest to use was the NetEqualizer followed by the Allot box.
They all managed traffic well as long as you know how to use the tool.
We are temporarily using Lokbox (now RGnet) to monitor concurrent connections, and set the limit to 600. It is surprizing how many users per day trigger over 600 connections, mostly from bit torrent, but some also using gaming machines. Customers that have called us have been told to limit their maximum connections in their software, and have generally done so, resulting in better overall performance of the AP/SM.
I have tried to recreate this situation on my own, and only bit torrent software seems to be able to do it. I have run several software simultaneously including limewire and video feeds and rarely gone over 100 connections at a time.
We are looking to use Imagestream routers, but I have yet to hear back if they offer maximum concurrent connections management.
I would like to hear what Motorola recommends for a maximum simultaneous connections for their radios. If you had 50 customers all running bit torrent, at 600 connections… would be over 30,000 connections. This must be hard for the packet processor to manage, even with version 9.3 running on an AP. Some WISP managers say that they allow 150 maximum, however with this setting, my email logs would be full every day.
What are some of the other people that manage this setting the maximum simultaneous connections at on their networks?
bglaser, could you provide a link to Lokbox (RGnet)? I can’t find details on it.
http://rgnets.com/
We are changing that out, and going with Powercode, which is much better for WISP. The lokbox was ok for dhcp and firewall, but is more designed for revenue generating locations such as hotels and public hotspots. We found Powecode to be much more designed for our wireless infrustructure, including managment of canopy products, as well as integrated mapping built into the billing system.