I’ve got one hotspot that needs a spot of attention.
The site itself is quite big. It runs on an RB600 with 3x5GHz panels and 3x2.4GHz sectorals connected to it. There are also fourteen additional Senao 802.11b bridges with panels or sectorals that connect back to media convertors, switches and eventually onto ether1 on the RB600.
wlan7 on the RB600 connects the unit to our backbone. We run a centralised User Manager setup in our data centre. This means a user can buy a voucher at this hotspot, use half an hour and then use the rest at one of our other hotspots at a later date.
The hotspot is located in a premier tourist destination and it works hard. It’s now 11:30pm on a cold, winter, Sunday night and there are 27 users connected to it. That will increase dramatically by lunch time of any day. With the large number of ip enabled devices, it’s not strange to see 140+ connections at 3:00am on a Sunday morning from people outside of nightclubs.
ether2 on the RB600 connects to a 2Mb fibre optic internet connection supplied by one of our local bandwidth providers. The IP’s fast and “uncut”, but expensive. The system’s getting clogged up during certain times of the day and I need to add more bandwidth.
Problem is that we pay per cm of fibre in that place and needless to say getting the IP to the site is very expensive. There’s also the issue of the additional bandwidth being used a lot between 11:00am and 9:00pm and then not being used at all after that. For example, those 27 users who are doing stuff right now aren’t even using 512Kb in total. So buying extra IP at the site will mean money that’s being burned during the night.
Things are different in our data centre, where we have a 100Mb UTP to the same traffic provider who are one floor above us in the same building. We don’t take 100Mb from them (yet) but they can upgrade or downgrade our IP as required. There they can basically give me anything my heart desires.
I’m thinking of buying an extra 2Mb and terminating it in the data centre, but for use at the hotspot. We offer an automated offsite backup service for several clients who’s servers are backed up to a SAN we have sitting in a rack at BT Martlesham outside Ipswich in the UK. By terminating the extra IP in our data centre I can use that bandwidth at night to upgrade the VPN link between Cape Town and Ipswich.
I’ve run btest on the link between the hotspot and our data centre and the link can sustain 24Mb throughput. It should therefore be able to handle another 2Mb.
The question now is how do I set up the routing there so that once the total throughput on ether2 hit’s 2Mb, the rest is sent via the radio link?
<=2Mb - out via ether2
2Mb - first 2Mb out via ether2, the rest out via wlan7.
Any ideas or examples would be appreciated.
The traffic is “full duplex”. There’s about as much going out as there is coming in. It’s not the traditional 10:1 web browsing traffic (if it was, I’d just dump a satellite dish on the roof and give them simplex IP via Sky-Vision). I suspect that the the arrival of sites such as facebook, blogger, youtube and flickr, people are now uploading their photos and videos from the nearest decent internet connection, instead of waiting until they get home.