Hi Guys,
I have the opportunity to become an ISP to my local fibre network. The data centre has suggested using rather a expensive Cisco router as a main router.
I’m keen to know how many 100Mbps clients will an RB1100 or 1300 actually handle?
Our initial WAN connection will be 1Gbps and the end users will receive 10-100 Mbps.
Thanks
The data rate is fairly irrelevant, what matters is packets per second. 1000 packets per second at 64 bytes/packet vs 1000 pps at 1500 byte/packet are very different data raters. What also matters is what you’re doing to the packets. Are you doing NAT? Then you need connection tracking, which is sort of expensive. Are you going to run QoS? Firewall rules? PPPoE?
It’s impossible to give you an answer other than ‘some’.
We won’t be running NAT as we’ll be buying a pool of public addresses from Ripe.
The deeper technicalities I can’t really answer. I plan on paying a Mikrotik consultant to do the setup as on this scale it’s probably a bit out of my depth.
We plan on running QoS.
The end users will be home and business with the normal use expectations of ADSL.
Oh and yes, with PPPoE.
The deeper technicalities I can’t really answer. I plan on paying a Mikrotik consultant to do the setup as on this scale it’s probably a bit out of my depth.
I’m afraid that it’s impossible to tell you how many clients you can realistically expect to run through the router without those details. With PPPoE and QoS I’d guessimate that you could do about 50-70,000 packets per second through an RB1100 (mind you, that’s a straight up guess and heavily depends on how QoS is done). What that means for throughput and how many customers you can serve depends on how many packets per second they each push through the router.
Ok, what do I need to find out for the question to be answered?
Do a traffic study on existing customers, or talk to someone who’s familiar with their traffic patterns already.
don’t worry too much. All your 100 customers probably do not coming at the same day. Start with RB1xxx and when that’s not enough, buy something with more horsepower, probably with x86 hardware. Maybe to share load between multiple smaller devices and just add them, when needed. As mentioned before, actual performance of the router depends from many unknown things, if you start from zero.
Better is to “domesticate” some MT specialist, instead of hiring him just once. You will need him later.