Limit bandwidth or internet usage per device/ip? Software or hardware?

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atf_mart

atf_mart

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Mar 6, 2013
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Hello everyone, my dad and me basically are the """IT""" managers of a small company in my town, we have 5 restaurants, a hotel and a convention center that we have to manage, now I am looking for a way to limit bandwidth of the users that connect to our public internet networks,

We have tried pretty much everything, from a Linux proxy with Smoothwall installed on it that works amazingly to block access to web pages, an ubuntu proxy with squid3 also to block access to certain web pages, to recently buying a tp link load balance router that I am still learning to use.

Now what I need is some advice, what would be the best way to manage this, the issue we have is that since a lot of people connect to our networks some of them go to the restaurant, buy a coffee and start downloading stuff or watching youtube videos that makes other users have a really slow connection.

What would you guys recommend, doing it via software (proxy like smoothwall or squid) or hardware via the TP-LINK Load balance router?

Thanks.
 
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Human Being

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Jun 28, 2015
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This a serious problem because now-a-days new wifi standards like 'ac' and 'N' are much faster.Although those user with low standard wifi that is 'b' and 'g' are the ones who are slowing down your network.Because 'ac' and 'N' are common standard operating upto 300Mbps.Not everyone out there affords a premium smartphone like iphone 6,galaxy s6,lg g4 and other same competitors.These top-end smartphones have wifi with latest standards i.e 'ac' so that is not an issue to your network,although users with out-dated drivers and old wifi standards are causing interference in your network slowing down.

Cheers!
 
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boosted1g

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Jun 12, 2013
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I don't think legacy equipment is his problem, its just people eating up his bandwidth trying to stream video and torrent download on his network.

Simple solution to the above problem is just set router to use N only and AES encryption. Even low end phones for the last 4 years have 150mbps wireless N. If their device is so old, then not having them as a customer to buy $1 cup of coffee and use his internet for the next 4 hours is probably saving him money instead of costing him.
 
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Human Being

Human Being

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Yeah that'll will do a little BUT premarily interference is also due to channel if he's having the same channel within the network with others then you (atf_mart) should change your wifi channel by via wifi settings provided in router.And channel should not be matched(same to others who have routers) For example In your area you're operating your router on channel 11 and people having routers too are near you with same channel then you should change it to another 1,4,6,7 or any other JUST IT SHOULD NOT MATCH OTHERS NEAR YOUR OPERATING ROUTERS! Otherwise a lot of interference will occur.I faced same problem a couple of weeks ago and I fixed it by changing the channel.I was having 4-5 Mbps instead of 10Mbps on wifi network then by changing wifi channel that doesn't match others (You can check others wifi channel via your router or any third party wifi monitoring software) I got nicely maximum potential 9-10Mbps only a slight drop down to 7Mbps when many users were connected.

Cheers!
 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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Even if you were to load third party firmware on your router it will be a challenge to use a consumer router to limit traffic. Since you already have proxy server it will be much easier to limit the traffic on there. Pretty much it is the same software on the router as the server since both are linux variants.

The problem with using the router is that you have a proxy involved. All the traffic from the users will appear to come from the proxy and you have no way to limit traffic by user

There are a number of traffic shaper softwares for linux. The key problem is most are designed to limit ip or group of ip addresses/mac addreses to a certain bandwidth. It is pretty easy to say ip x.x.x.x can only use 2mbit/sec or has a bandwidth limit of 10m/day, The problem is you have to key all these in manually in most systems. It would be a huge pain to key in every possible ip address and put a traffic shaper on each.

There are ones that dynamically add ip with limits but I have not seen a free one. I suspect they exist but I have always done this type of function on a expensive commercial F5 box put out by big ip.
 
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bill001g

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Does no good. The problem is download. You can give outbound packets priority but it has no effect on the rate traffic is sent from the ISP to you. The ISP will drop packets randomly and by the time the local router get involved it can do nothig to somehow give the discarded packet priority and drop something else,

 
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gbb0330

gbb0330

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you are on the right path, i like IPCop better than smoothwall, has very nice content filter that works great and some options to limit bandwidth that i have not tried but its worth a shot, since its free.

Most of our small business clients use Dell sonicwalls to control bandwidth usage
 
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Kewlx25

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TCP:80 is many times the problem since that's how web streaming typically works.

My recommendation would be to get a router that support fq_Codel, which means a router that supports OpenWRT. On top of that, if you can setup HFSC traffic shaping, you can give 40/443 the lions share of the bandwidth while letting everything else use any free bandwidth.

You can shape download bandwidth. Dropping packets signals the sender to back off.
 
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atf_mart

atf_mart

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Wow thanks everyone for the support, now I can assure you that channels is not the issue, its that people eats the bandwidth, I havent used QoS because I heard it is really hard to setup, I will get more into that then.

Will be updating soon.

A way of limitng bandwitdh per IP could be awesome too, since IP's are always the same, regardless of the device, I have a lease time of 15 minutes, so if xx.xx.xx.15 has a limited bandwidth of 1mbps regardless of the device that uses that ip it should be limited right?

thank you all
 
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nigelivey

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Dec 6, 2011
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Swap out the router for something like Pfsense, set traffic shapers/limiters and Qs, Use the built in captive portal and or Radius server. Perhaps look at OpenDns for basic content filtering. I am a little surprised that you don't seem to know much about this yet look after 5 Restaurants, hotel and convention center. How many concurrent users are you seeing on the network?
 
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atf_mart

atf_mart

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Well its a family business, on the 3rd generation managing it, and my dad an I were the only ones interested in improving the IT side of the company, but we are trying to improve, now there are a lot of things that make things worse here, the max speeds we can get from a reasonable priced ISP is 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up, yes, 1 up its like 1998 all over again. I was looking into Open MESH but still haven't made a choice yet.

In the meantime what I did was splitting services, instead of having 3 independent 10 Mbps services for a total of 30 Mbps, I started switching them to 3 or 5 Mbps services and dividing it in sectors. its working for now since if a client connects and eats all the bandwidth of that router all he can eat is up to 3 or 5 Mbps, and the other routers are unaffected, and each sector has its own 1 Mbps Up, instead of having just 1 Mbps up for an entire 10 Mbps service, but I am still looking into a more efficient solution. We are not charging for our WiFi so that's also why we cant afford business ISP. Plus my grandpa who is the owner is really cheap with stuff he doesn't understand, and our budget is very limited if non existent.

Thanks,

 
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Bruce Geng

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1. Proxy software is not recommended. Because proxy is only for web traffic, p2p traffic can not be filtered. Proxy can not limit bandwidth rate either.

2. Tplink routers are great for home network with less than 50 users. Easier to setup, features are also good.

3. For your IT business, I would recommend you to setup a NG firewall. A NG firewall can act as a powerful gateway to provide internet access, filter internet traffic, limit bandwidth rate, block p2p traffic, firewall protection and much more. You need a pc with two network cards to install a NG firewall. For firewall systems, you can try "WFilter NG firewall", "Untangle" or "Sophos UTM". They all have free and business licenses.
 
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