Hi all
We are supplying wifi to 20 000 people, who are going to be authenticated through a Mikrotik hotspot and external Radius Server.
I am looking at some of the larger RB’s and wondering which one is best for this type of traffic? Perhaps a RouterBoard 1100AHx2?
Regards
Hi Sigma,
Depends on what you are expecting the unit to do.
Is it just for AAA or shall you then be doing mangling, queuing … ?
Do you need on-board encryption, de-decryption?
Also, with 20k users, you might want to think about some load balancing and/or redundancy.
Rgds,
Mark.
From what I was reading here in the forum between the lines often,
the RB1100AHx2 is able to handle something around 500 “active” hotspot users.
But I have also seen some interesting setups with several RB1100AHx2 in
combination with this Handlink Internet Subscriber Server
Hi,
I have around 2000 Routerboards running hotspots, from 411’s to CCR and x86 servers.
Working out what device/s you need to think of other important factors such as bandwidth, firewall rules etc. For example you might have a 951U with 200 hotspot users with a WAN bandwidth 20Mb/s and no firewall rules this would work fine, try a 951U with 50 users + 1Gb/s WAN bandwidth + 50 firewall rules this wouldn’t work. So “how many hotspot users” isn’t always the best question.
Another thing you need to think about is how you are going to segregate broadcasts/traffic. Do you plan to run multiple hotspot servers on the device? If your going to run multiple hotspots have you thought about roaming?
Is this for some kind of stadium Wi-Fi solution or a multi-tenanted centralized hotspot server? Whats the bandwidth requirements? Will users be accessing the similar content (at a stadium it is likely)? Have you thought about caching? Do you have a separate firewall to protect the network or do you plan on the hotspot server being a firewall also? Most countries have some kind of data retention law, which country is it for? (depending on country will depend on how/what you need to capture this can have effect of CPU+MEM usage) How are you going to capture/transport/store the data? How many public IP’s do you plan on NAT’ing the users traffic too? (as the maximum number of TCP connections is just of 65,000 meaning that a single public IP would only be able to deliver each user with 3 connections). Do you plan on running VOIP over the same network? Have you thought about QoS? Do you plan on using an inspecting L7 data? Are you planning on content filtering, if so how are you going to achieve it?
20,000 is a lot of users its not just a question of 1 device, redundancy and good network design is key. There is not enough detail to answer your question, If I was you I would contact a MikroTik consultant with experience in this area and get them to work with you in deployment, or outsource it to an experienced company.
A good consultant should be asking you lots of questions. Anyone who can recommend what hardware to use on the basis of 20k hotspot users is a muppet.