Wireless Access

Our current bandwidth contracts for guest users don't provide adequate bandwidth and I am considering all options to provide them with more bandwidth.  We currently implement per-user contracts, but think per-role makes more sense as I feel like it gives us more control over the total amount of (Internet) bandwidth guest users can consume and since the bandwidth is essentially pooled they'll be able to burst to higher speeds when other guests are using smaller amounts of bandwidth.

In addition to bandwidth contracts, I think it may be a good idea to create traffic management profiles and allocate a small amount of bandwidth to guests.  The Campus VRD says at least 10% should be allowed for guests, but I think if I allocate 10% this will end up being more than the amount allowed in my bandwidth contract.  So if our Internet pipe is 100Mbps and I want the guest role to have 10Mbps, how do I come up with my bw allocation percentage?  What is the percentage based on?  I'm thinking it just wouldn't make sense to allocate more bandwidth in the traffic management profile than is configured in the bandwidth contract.

Short advice.  Per-User bandwidth contracts for guests are the way to go.  Quite frankly, you should NOT use bandwidth contracts if you have adequate internet bandwidth.  Your guests will love your for it

Traffic Management profile are intended for use in a multi-tenant situation where you have multiple customers who use different SSIDs you want to guarantee one customer a certain percentage of the bandwidth over another.

With that being said, many people configure bandwidth contracts and Traffic management profiles and forget.  Later when they  try to troubleshoot drops and performance issues, it is hard to determine if traffic management, interference or congestion is the culprit.

Long story short - If you have adequate internet bandwidth, do NOT use bandwidth contracts for your users.

Traffic Management profiles make it harder to troubleshoot performance issues and should probably not be used in combination with any other bandwidth shaping function.

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@cjoseph wrote:

 

With that being said, many people configure bandwidth contracts and Traffic management profiles and forget.  Later when they  try to troubleshoot drops and performance issues, it is hard to determine if traffic management, interference or congestion is the culprit.

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Yes, that's definitely been my concern.  I know myself, and this would be forgotten later on.  Much rather keep it simple if it doesn't make sense to use the traffic management profiles.

Thanks for the advice.

CJ, We're in a situation where we want to retire a dedicated traffic shaping appliance, but still want some "fairness" applied to user traffic, we have a comfortable amount of bandwidth (no longer in the bw famine days). What do you recommend?

I was looking at BW contracts that would be loose enough to only affect the top %2 (who represent the lions share of used BW).

thx