Bandwidth Management with 1841 Router

[shijasm]

Hi There

Please help

In one of our costumer location we have a complicated scenario; the site is in a desert and no physical land lines available, therefore TELCO have agreed with FSO technology to provide 2 MBPS lease line and there will be three separate companies working on site. Is there any way to segregate the bandwidth 512 KBPS---512 KBPS-----1 MBPS using a CISCO 1841 router?.if no is there any other solution

Regards

Shijas

[tdrais]

Short answer is yes a 1841 can easily run quality of service options at 2m. It has the same IOS features of most other router and has more than enough cpu power.

You have a additional problem in that you cannot really do quality of service from only one end of the connection no matter what type of router.

You really need to apply the rules as the traffic is SENT your slowest link in this case your 2m connection. This means you must appply the same rules on both routers on either end of the connection.

Now you can to a point limit the traffic coming in to a router and it works sometimes depending on the type of traffic.

As a example of traffic that is a problem. Assume you have a server that is streaming video like security cameras at a fixed rate using UDP at the far end of the link. Your local router can drop the traffic and not forward it to the user at the local site but the traffic still consumed the bandwidth. The end user was still limited in what he actually saw but you still have a problem.

Now if we assume you have control of both routers and do quality of service you can look at specifics to your question.

Your first issue is to have the router identify the 3 companies. This will all come down to ip addresess in one form or another. This could be a simple as assigning static ips to a pc based on a company to running vlans with different DHCP scopes.

In anycase you will end up defining 3 classes in the router that match these ip address groups that correspond to the company.

Now that your routers have classified the traffic you have a couple of options. It will depend on if these bandwidth restrictions are hard caps or guarenteed rates.

If they are simple caps then you use a POLICE option in your policy and drop all traffic that exceeded the rate.

If you want to allow your companies to use more bandwidth if it is not being used you can use the BANDWIDTH statement. There are configuration issue with using bandwidths that add to 100% of the line but as long as this is all the traffic that is on the line you can use something like 400k,400k,800k or 450k,450k,900k and get simlar results.

[amit-singh]

Hi Shijas,

What type of interface the Telco will be providing to you Is it ethernet or serial ?

If its ethernet, then one thing that we can thought of is to use either a layer 3 switch or Cisco1841 with a 4-port Etherswitch module and then taking out a copper cable and route it to different offices.This way we can give a connection to each and every office.

Now on 1841/L3 switch at the main site run PBR and apply QOS to restrict the bandwidth as per the sorce traffic coming in from diferent offices. You can also you policing and rate limiting to drop the traffic if it exceeds the bandwidth that has been allocated to different offices.

This is just one Idea that came ot my mind.

HTH,

-amit singh