I am looking at putting a routerboard in a conference centre to act as a hotspot system for a combination of wireless and wired networks. The conference centre is designed to hold multiple events at one time, and has a wireless system capable of handling 900 simultaneous devices with a 100mbit internet connection to be shared to all users.
Ideally we will not actually create individual user accounts, but instead create a user account for each event i.e. users in conference A will all login as “ConferenceA” and users in Conference B will log in as “ConferenceB”. We would then like to be able to track usage for each event login, probably using radius for the AAA i.e. ConferenceA used 2.5gb of data.
Will the RB1100, RB1200 or RB1100AH models be capable of 900 simultaneous hotspot users in this situation?
Which model is the most powerful, and best suited to the job?
In my experience none of the Routerboard models would be suitable for 900~ hotspot users.
The only way you could even hope to do this would be to use no queues at all + basic hotspot setup, pointing to external DNS (not relaying) and have a 100M pipe into the site so you don’t get any contention. (Which for a conference venue I imagine is highly unlikely).
My suggestion would be:
20-40M pipe (conference users aren’t likely to be hammering bandwidth all day)
an x86 Box (I’d recommend a Dell R210 as they’re 1RU and half depth so can be mounted in smaller racks)
setup PCQ based queues rather than using a rate limit (and simple queues) for each login as this is much more efficient and then there’s the fact that simple-queues don’t work correctly in v5.0 and aren’t removed correctly in v5.4
The largest site I deal with currently serves over 1500 users with around 700~ active at peak usage time and pumps 100Mbps of traffic, this was running v4.13, then v4.17 and now v5.4 with no game-breaking issues.
Final note: Something similar to the R210 would do if you want to run a v4.X version as the R210 Ethernet cards are only supported in v5
Are you running your system using a R210 server to handle those ~700 simultaneous users?
My client has said that while the wireless network is capable of 900 devices, this is over a large area. The chances of having 900 devices spread out enough to actually all be connected is slim. It is more likely that the most devices on the network at one time will be around the ~400 mark, however they would like the system to still work even if they had the network maxed.
The pipe to the site is 100mbit.
I was planning on using a external DNS, and rate limiting each user to 200-500kbit, possibly also putting a proxy server on site. Delegates are advised that the network is designed for email and web browsing, so we feel this is plenty of speed for that purpose. There is already a dedicated 3g cell network on site, which we think many users will continue to use on mobile devices.
Is it possible to run two routerboards and share the load between them?
The R210 (and other similar servers) are used as sites for this amount of users yes.
Yes you could run across 2 devices either a) split the work being done (have one do hotspot, the other do queuing) or b) have the network divided into a couple of segments with both routers connected to each of these and balance the load between them.
I have run 1,800 concurrent users on an RB1100. Works OK with PCQ, I imagine simple queues wouldn’t work. Models with better CPUs could do more users. But yes, that included offloading DNS etc. like omega described.
That said I recently ran 1,400 concurrent users on a Dell r210 with Intel NICs and it barely touched 6%. I agree you should go with those. Room to grow and all.
Disagree on the pipe. Some conferences can suck down huge amounts of bandwidth. Tech conferences has attendees on VPN working all day, for example. Depends on the event, of course. I’d aim for 50Mbps Metro-e with an option to burst.
The wireless portion is definitely doable. 30-35 APs depending on a site survey. Definitely offer 5Ghz, we find about 40% of users can use it in convention settings and service on it is stellar. If possible use a controller based AP solution. I do like Cisco’s a lot, but anything that manages RF for you will work. People will bring in their own APs and you won’t want to adjust your settings around their interference all the time.
That will also allow you to rapidly change SSIDs and security settings, allowing you to customize wireless for events. That can be quite a revenue stream.
Edit: apparently I lack reading comprehension early in the morning. Oh well. Post might still be useful.
[quote=WebbyGiants post_id=704585 time=1545403853 user_id=134944]
There is no Routerboard model available which is capable of controlling 900 devices simultaneously.
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What was the point of this reply to a 7.5 year old thread? Nothing is relevant these days with this thread.
