I´m running a new ISP with 20 customers so far, all connected via NanoLoco M5 to Ubiquiti Panels, all managed by mikrotik 750UP. Until two days ago, everything was fine, however we started to notice that the rb was getting congestion, and pings were getting really high (500, 1000, etc.). After checking, we noticed that it was happening when any customer had more than 100 connections at the time. When a customer like this gets disconnected, everything goes back to normal.
So, we are trying to set some rules in order to keep this number down. I have a couple of doubts, and would really appreciate some help:
Is this normal? more than a 100 connections going trough the radios would collapse the whole net?
How do you handle these situations if that is the reason?
This sounds like a wireless problem and you should try to change some settings on the ubiquiti radios. Maybe turn on airmax if it is off at the moment.
What you can do on the mikrotik side which I suspect you are using as a router for these customers is limit the number of connections which will improve the situation.
I think airmax is very useful for point-to-multipoint which is his case. This is a tdma protocol. Of course I like nv2 much more which doesn’t have problem with number of connections, but it is too late for that for you now.
But anyway I use plain 802.11 in my wireless customer connections because the cpe gear is from different vendors and there is nothing else I can do. So for 802.11 with high number of connections this is almost sure to happen.
The best thing you can do is make sure all your clients have good signal, use a clear channel, make sure everyone is connected with high bitrate.
Tip. - With airmax on there is an option on client devicesfor priority.
Just some quick questions. When you say the ping rates are slow, what are you pinging?
When this is happening can you try a few things.
Ping the router from client side, what are the response times?
Ping there internet from client side, what are the response times?
Ping the internet from the router, What are the response times?
Do you have any queues controlling speeds?
What is the speed of your connection?
Based on your answers here these we can move forward.
you could set a firewall rule to limit the number of udp and tcp conenctions per client as well. It’s possible someone is maxing out the radio’s maximum packets per second abilities.
Last time I saw this in the wild it was a low/noisy signal wireless client who was connecting at low rate downloading a torrent, thereby lowering the effective rate of the AP as a whole.