I am looking for some user suggestions on a good bandwidth control setup. Let me first provide a little info about our network. Our company was build by buying out a bunch of smaller WISPs, over a dozen, and it’s been my job to rebuild them and merge them together. Right now we have over 120 tower sites and growing. We use BGP to several providers at two different sites with plans to bring on a third exit point in the near future. The original networks are all a mix of equipment and we have been working on trying to standardize the gear at the tower sites and have replaced or rebuild many of the sites. We do have a mix of Mikrotik, Canopy, Waverider, Tranzeo, Cisco, and several other off brands of radios. We are also moving into Wimax with another vendor. We do not have a EMS server (I want one for the several dozen aps we have) for the Canopy gear and just handle the rate limits in the radios and the wimax gear has it’s own EMS server to handle the same. I am working on installing a Mikrotik router at every site (some of the old networks were all bridged) but there are still many sites that do not have one yet. What I am looking for is a way to handle bandwidth management centrally, I would prefer at the core and controlled by one central device.
I have started looking at the User Manager and Hotspot but I have not found a way to make it work the way I want it to. We would like to be able to have a set tx/rx limit for unauthorized clients and then be able to have various rate plans setup to which we can assign the customer to.
Since I am installing a Mikrotik router at each site, right now it’s a 493AH and once the 1100s come out I have many sites that will get one of those, should I do the bandwidth management there? I have played with PCQs and do have a working device on a remote network that works great but I have had problems with it when I set the speed limits to the global-in/out instead of ethernet ports. The one site works great because it sits at the head end between the external router and internal switch. I have thought about doing the same for my main network but I don’t want to have to add an IP address to each device for every customer. I do have a radius server running for user management of the Mikrotik and Cisco devices. Can I use that for customer management as well? Let unauthorized clients through at a set speed and let authorized clients through at another speed?
I know I’ve thrown a lot out there and I could keep going but don’t want to make this too long. Any suggestions?
