Hello, we've had a set up in a hotel for a few years (small hotel, less than 100 rooms). We have guests coming in and doing all sorts of stuff with the wired ethernet ports. The most problematic is when people plug their own access points in (especially backwards). All rooms participate on the same broadcast domain. So, when someone brings in their own DHCP server, we ofter get calls about 'the internet isn't working'. I was thinking about setting up each room on it's own VLAN and trunking all the VLAN id's back to Mikrotik. I'm just not certain of what sort of configuration I could give MT... I was looking for suggestions. I was thinking about making a bunch of NAT'd /30's for each room on private address space... Looking for idea's/suggestions. The hotel is on a budget so buying some crazy expensive Cisco switches are pretty much out of the question. Any thoughts? Thanks MT user community - I'm out of ideas

If you can't get in switches (doesn't have to be Cisco) that can do client isolation on the edge or at least can do access control so you can block traffic based on layer 3/layer 4 headers your best bet is one VLAN per room on a /30.

If you don't have a big budget, you may also consider to use the old RB600As + the 816 expansion..
6 of them and you have 108 isolated ports.
It will cost around 1100€
If you can't find the RB600, you can ask around some distributors, they should have still some on stock.

thank you for suggestions thus far - anyone else care to comment?

My suggestion is why invest in wired network if everything is going to be wireless sooner than later. ipod does not even have eth port not to mention all the phones.

Having been there and done that, the cheapest but still effective solution was to use port-based VLANs (i.e. not VLAN tagging) on the cheapest switches which supported it. A pair of 48 port basic managed switches will cost about GBP500. As long as the switch supports as many port groups as it has ports, it should work perfectly well.

Hello, we've had a set up in a hotel for a few years (small hotel, less than 100 rooms). We have guests coming in and doing all sorts of stuff with the wired ethernet ports. The most problematic is when people plug their own access points in (especially backwards). All rooms participate on the same broadcast domain. So, when someone brings in their own DHCP server, we ofter get calls about 'the internet isn't working'. I was thinking about setting up each room on it's own VLAN and trunking all the VLAN id's back to Mikrotik. I'm just not certain of what sort of configuration I could give MT... I was looking for suggestions. I was thinking about making a bunch of NAT'd /30's for each room on private address space... Looking for idea's/suggestions. The hotel is on a budget so buying some crazy expensive Cisco switches are pretty much out of the question. Any thoughts? Thanks MT user community - I'm out of ideas

We have a 32 unit apartment building that we provide Internet service to. When we took it over from another ISP, it had very old 10baseT Cisco switches on every floor set up in a simple flat network (like your's). First, we kicked up the bandwidth for the complex but still had many problems and complaints like you describe. The switches didn't support standard 802.1Q vlans (only ISL) so after about a year we replaced them (at our cost) with used Cisco 2924XL switches. We connected them to a Mikrotik RB532 router and gave each room a vlan, their own private class C, and DHCP service. In our IP numbering scheme, the third octet is the apartment number.

That was about 4 years ago. We saw an immediate decrease in bandwidth usage, and have never had to increase bandwidth. We rarely have service calls, and when we do, it is simple to troubleshoot since we can easily identify traffic problems to the apartment.

You could easily do something like this with your hotel and the isolation would eliminate one room from taking down the others.

Good luck,

Tom