Hello
When "upper limit" do you mean the negotiated committed interface rate (CIR) you have agreed with your ISP.?
If so,I would suggest to shape rather then police outbound on your wan link if you think you may over utilise your rate limit.
Policing is more severe and would begin to drop packets when they reach there defined limit as such you would see more of an uneven connection as you would if you used shaping.
Shaping "buffers" it excess packets unitl the next tc interval ( this is a time interval when each burst of traffic can be sent) thus over a average time (1000ms-1sec) you should get the CIR rate you have specified and with that a much smoother connection than policing would offer but the down side is probably more latency due to the queuing of these excess packets.
The reason why shaping is in an outbound direction is, you have not control over the traffic being forwarded to you, as by the time it has reached you it already traversed the wan link.
Policing is preferable Inbound from you LAN interfaces as such when packets dont conform to your policing limits they can be remarked instead of dropped and these remarked packets can then be placed in a less preferred shape class prior to being forwarded out on the wan link>
Fair queuing can then be applied so packets would get some degree of fairness wan leaving the wan link as apposed to the default FIFO queuing method (FIrst In First Out) which doesn't provided this fairness thus less preferred class packets can be staved of bandwidth.
res
Paul
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Kind Regards
Paul
