Doubt about balancing WIFI bandwidth

RouterOS General
1

Hi, my name is Javier. I have a 50MB internet contract from my ISP. I want to buy a mikrotik router and I don’t know which one to choose. I want to do the following:
Of the 50MB that my ISP gives me, I want 40MB to be dedicated for my desktop computer. And the remaining 10 MB of internet that are distributed among the WIFI mobile devices (TVs, mobile phones, etc).
Based on what I want to do I have two doubts:

  1. Is it necessary to buy a mikrotik with integrated WIFI?
  2. What mikrotik model would be ideal for me.
2

No. You can use your existing WiFi AP if you prefer.


For a 50 Mbit/s bandwidth, any currently available model with four and more Ethernet ports will do.

3

I have a question. How do I limit the WIFI bandwidth of my AP Router (which my ISP gave me) if you tell me that it is not necessary to buy a mikrotik with built-in Wifi.
I know that bandwidth limits are made with Mikrotik - Simple Queues and Queue Tree.
However, if I buy a mikrotik without WIFI how would I control the bandwidth of the WIFI output.

If you have noticed. I am new to this and I would like some of you to give me some help.

4

The quality of the answer depends on the quality of a question. It wasn’t clear from your OP that the WiFi AP you have is embedded into an all-in-one combo (modem+router+wireless AP) provided by your ISP because you gave no information about your current setup at all. So describe what you currently have, including the type of uplink (optical/Cable TV/copper Ethernet/wireless/VDSL) and ISP-provided device model, and you may get a better response.

5

Please excuse my lack of clarity in my questions.
In the following lines I am going to describe what I have and what I want and what are the questions I have about Mikrotik:

I have:

  1. A Model TCG220 Askey Router modem. It is a combo (modem + router + wireless AP)
  2. My ISP provider gives me 50MB of Internet Fiber optics.

I want:

  1. Balance the bandwidth so that from the 50MB to my personal computer reaches at least 40MB from the internet. And the remaining 10 MB are distributed among the WIFI devices in my house.

About Mikrotik:

  1. Is it necessary to buy a mikrotik router with built-in wifi?
  2. In the case that it is not necessary to buy the mikrotik with integrated wifi. How to make a balance of bandwidth using the Combo AP (modem + router + wireless AP).considering that it must have reached 40MB on my personal computer.

Thank you very much.

6

Google only shows models with coax cable uplink when searching for “TCG220” - which doesn’t mean that a version with fibre optic uplink doesn’t exist, but it means that such version may have different firmware capabilities, so what I write below may not apply to that model.


  1. after a brief look into the TCG220 manual, it seems you can use the WiFi AP in the TCG220 and loop the traffic through the Mikrotik, by disabling the DHCP server in the TCG220 and running two subnets in the same LAN segment - one for communication between the Mikrotik and the TCG220 itself, and another one for communication between Mikrotik and the wireless clients registered to the TCG220. The DHCP server would run on Mikrotik and would assign IP addresses from the second subnet to the wireless clients.

But as this is only likely, not 100% sure, I’d take that way only if you can try it before actually purchasing the wired-only Mikrotik. So if you can borrow a Mikrotik somewhere to do the test, start from this point, I’ll only spend time describing the detailed setup for the test if you confirm you need it.

  1. the bandwidth control setup on the Mikrotik will be the same no matter whether you use an internal WiFi AP of the Mikrotik, the one in the TCG220, or some other external one.
7

I thank you for your excellent answers to my questions. You are a very capable person in the subject and the most important thing is that you have the attitude of helping others. I want to thank you for that. Thank you very much.


Now I will ask you the same question above but with a different combo router model (modem + router + wireless AP).

I have:

  1. A Model Huawei HG8245H Router modem. It is a combo (modem + router + wireless AP)
  2. My ISP provider gives me 150MB of Internet Fiber optics.

I want:

  1. Balance the bandwidth so that from the 150MB to my personal computer reaches at least 100MB from the internet. And the remaining 50 MB are distributed among the WIFI devices in my house.

About Mikrotik:

  1. Is it necessary to buy a mikrotik router with built-in wifi?
  2. In the case that it is not necessary to buy the mikrotik with integrated wifi. How to make a balance of bandwidth using the Combo AP (modem + router + wireless AP).considering that it must have reached 100MB on my personal computer.

I apologize to you for the many questions that I ask of you.

8

The response is the same like for the other model of the combo, as the on-board DHCP server in the Huawei can be disabled too. However, for 150 Mbit/s download bandwidth, the choice of Mikrotik model becomes more important. First, it must support Gigabit Ethernet ports to accommodate 150 Mbit/s of aggregate uplink bandwidth, and second, I’m not sure whether mipsbe-based models are capable of handling bandwidth control at 150 Mbit/s. So to stay at safe side, I’d choose between hAP ac² and hEX, preferring the former although the recommended price is $10 higher.

To test the concept of using the AP in the combo, any model will do.

And of course, you must have admin access to the combo in both cases.

Regarding the bandwidth control itself, it’s a separate discipline. This is an excellent summary of the QoS handling, but for your task, the actual configuration will be much simpler. The most important point is that you can control only part of the download bandwidth - some types of traffic ignore any feedback, so even if you do not forward this type of traffic from the uplink to the local destination, you won’t prevent the source from occupying the download bandwidth. But the share of this type of traffic is normally not significant.

9

I have 2 additional questions:

  1. Based on what we have been talking about, do you think the Mikrotik rb750gr3 would be ideal for my purpose?
  2. How do I do this? I am going to quote one of his answers to my questions,In this case, the TCG220 must be replaced by the Huawei HG8245H : "running two subnets in the same LAN segment - one for communication between the Mikrotik and the TCG220 itself, and another one for communication between Mikrotik and the wireless clients registered to the TCG220. The DHCP server would run on Mikrotik and would assign IP addresses from the second subnet to the wireless clients "
10
  1. looking into the manual of the HG8245H I could google up, from the screenshots it seems that there is a possibility to set up multiple SSIDs, but the text doesn’ mention anything related so I cannot guess whether you can map those SSIDs to VLANs or to individual Ethernet ports, plus the machine seems to support only 2.4 GHz WiFi. So if a single SSID and the 2.4 GHz band alone are sufficient for you, adding hEX (RB750Gr3) should be sufficient. However, I repeat again that it should be possible to loop the traffic through the Mikrotik device and use the AP in the Huawei, but I wouldn’t rely on that possibility without testing it first.

So if you either cannot use a friend’s Mikrotik to test, or if you want more flexibility (support of multiple SSIDs with individual treatment and support of both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi bands), I’d really recommend to spend those $10 more and forget about the limited WiFi functionality of the Huawei.

  1. to use the AP in the Huawei and loop the traffic through the Mikrotik:
  • configure LAN IP of the Huawei to 192.168.1.1/24
  • switch off the DHCP server on the Huawei (which means you’ll have to manually configure 192.168.1.3/24 on the PC from which you configure the Huawei)
  • remove any and all rules in /ip firewall filter and /ip firewall nat of the Mikrotik; you can only afford to simplify your life by doing this because the Huawei acts as a firewall, otherwise removing firewall rules would be a very bad idea.
  • remove the DHCP client attached to the WAN interface of the Mikrotik (probably ether1)
  • configure WAN IP of the Mikrotik to 192.168.1.2/24 and the default route of the Mikrotik to 192.168.1.1:
    /ip address add address=192.168.1.2/24 interface=ether1
    /ip route add gateway=192.168.1.1
  • add the following rule to the Mikrotik
    /ip firewall nat add chain=srcnat dst-address=!192.168.0.0/16 action=src-nat to-addresses=192.168.1.2

The above will make Mikrotik send any traffic it receives from anywhere via the Huawei and make it look as if it was sending it itself.

Next, add the subnet for wireless clients together with DHCP server and its settings also to ether1:
/ip address add address=192.168.2.1/24 interface=ether1
/ip dhcp-server network add address=192.168.2.0/24 gateway=192.168.2.1 dns-server=192.168.1.1
/ip pool add name=for-wifi ranges=192.168.2.2-192.168.2.254
/ip dhcp-server add address-pool=for-wifi disabled=no interface=ether1 name=for-wifi

With these settings, the wireless settings (SSID, WPA passphrase etc.) will be configured using the Huawei GUI; the IP addresses will be assigned to the wireless clients by the Mikrotik.

If this basic setup works, you can proceed to implementation of the QoS setup (using either “simple queues” or “queue tree” together with mangle rules) to split the bandwidth among wired and wireless clients, or groups of clients…