ISE as a Quota Policy Control Rules Engine

[Arne Bier]

If I had a Dollar each time a customer asked me "can ISE enforce traffic quotas on my Guest portal?"

I normally tell them to go buy ClearPass instead ... lol.  Just kidding.  But seriously, in the enterprise environment I think that option is not too far from the truth.

It's sad that ISE doesn't do much with Radius Accounting.  I would argue that the next killer application in ISE should be quota processing for the Guest use case.  I know we don't discuss road map on these forums, so I don't expect an answer.   

However, what are the practical next steps for a customer who has invested heavily in ISE and Cisco WLC, when confronted with this requirement?  What does one tell them to do?

[Nidhi · Accepted solution]

Hi Arne,

This is not supported

But the best thing to do is to reach out to ISE Product Management team via your sales channel to raise a feature request. 

Thanks,

Nidhi

[Arne Bier]

Is this a common request in other parts of the world?  Perhaps one day there will be ubiquitous uncapped internet plans, but the reality is that a lot of service providers are incapable or unwilling to change. 

Feature request may never happen and I don't see anyone jumping on the bandwagon.  What are the realistic steps one could take to implement such a scheme?  I am thinking of some third party product that someone may have perhaps used in the past?  

There are a lot of custom/bespoke systems that run on open source wireless router platforms but it's small scale.  The only enterprise solution I have seen so far is Aruba Clearpass - I have not used this feature in Clearpass myself but I will evaluating it soon.  It can do everything ISE can do and in this SMB space it fulfils that specific need.

[paul]

ISE can sent WLC attributes to control guest bandwidth per user.  That doesn't set a hard quota, but does limit their bandwidth consumption.  Will that not suffice?

[Arne Bier]

Hi @paul - this is probably the best we can do in lieu of a quota management system.  If you throttle the bandwidth of a session then you can make it unpleasant enough for anyone wanting to potentially use it for anything other than reading their emails. 

The wireless guys will argue that (in a high density environment mostly), if someone wants to download a 20MB file for example, it's better to let them download it as quickly as possible to free up the airwaves.  But in less dense environments it's probably a moot point.