Leasing Internet Access

[mes]

Hi

I have a friend who rents out 14 small offices to small companies.

He has asked me to help him setup the network infrastructure, however I have some questions that I hope you could help answer.

All the offices are already cabled back to a central rack cabinet. I am getting a 50/50 Mbit fiber connection from the ISP.

The idea is to lease out internet access but limit each office/company to 5/5 Mbit.

How would I go on about doing this? Is L2 / L3 switches capable of doing this? Or is there a better way?

I was thinking of creating a vlan pr. office/company since they should act as seperate networks.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

/Regards Martin

[Chetan Kumar Ress]

Hi Martin ,

You can configure the rate-limit under the interface of that locaiton to limit the traffice ot bandwidth

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_0/qos/command/reference/qrcmdr.html

Regards

Chetan

[Jon Marshall]

Martin

If you want to have a vlan per customer which is a good idea then you will need at least a L3 switch to do that.

What kit do you already have ?

Have you considered security issues ie. what traffic to allow in and out to the internet etc. Bear in mind if the internet line is leased to your friend he could well be liable to both the customers within the building and just as importantly be liable for anything the customers get up to on the internet.

Generally speaking routers have better QOS capabilities than L3 switches but before progressing i would sort out the security issues.

Jon

[mes]

Well I haven't purchased any equipment yet.

I have worked with Cisco 2960's and 3750's before, but I was thinking if there's a cheaper L3 switch between the 2 series, but still capable of limiting the bandwidth.

Security is of course on my mind, would access-lists be sufficient to seperate the vlan's?

What's best practise to create those without having to deny every vlan?

Content filtering / Firewall wise Cisco can be very expensive, and I am not sure my friend has the budget for that.

Was thinking of a cheaper 3rd party product for the WAN gateway.

[mes]

Also about the rate-limit command.

Was looking at an example: rate-limit input 200000 37500 37500 conform-action transmit exceed-action drop

The drop at the end, does that mean it drops the packets?

Would'nt that increase the number of retransmissions or am I missing something?