Throttling Guest WLAN on WLC 8500

[elishaschmidt]

What is the best practise to throttle the Guest WLAN, which is only used for Internet access?

[Stephen Rodriguez]

It Depends.

There really is no best practice for how much to throttle your guest traffic, there are too many variables.

how big is your pipe?

is it shared with internal resources?

how many guests are you expecting?

are you going to throttle per device/user or the entire VLAN?

it all depends on what you/your company feel is right for your situation.

HTH,

Steve

[elishaschmidt]

Steve,

We are just trying to throttle our guest network so our internal resources are not impacted. We have 4 SSIDs being deployed, 2 of those are guest networks both of which are on their own vlan. We would throttle the entire vlan on each of the guest networks. 

Are there any guides on Bandwidth throttling with the WLC 8500? 

[luceroc]

I agree with Steve.  The situation is really going to depend on your bandwidth and just how important you feel your guest traffic is.   You also have to run a higher version of code at least 7.4 to get more granular with limiting.

But here's something to consider.  My deployments are pretty much a controller per facility.  I tend to bandwidth limit by (guest) SSID and just provide a 10mbps DOWN and 5mbps UP.  Of course depends on the size of the facility and the number of guests.  That said my guests users are typically email and browsers but there are more and more video streamers coming online but for now I use 10M and 5m and run about 300 connections with no problems.

***I don't like to modify the Qos profile and limit because that requires that you shut down the radios.  I like to modify the override section on the WLAN / Qos settings. 

Good luck.

[Leo Laohoo]

We would throttle the entire vlan on each of the guest networks. 

This does NOT sound like a wireless configuration.  If you want to throttle the entire VLAN, then you need to configure policy-shaping in your core network (where the default gateway of the VLAN resides).   Because if you do bandwidth shaping at the wireless, your wired network might get impacted.  

In regards to bandwidth throttling, there's a very-fine-line between slowing down the speed (somewhat) and the speed is so slow people will not use it.   I have seen a case where a company put a dedicated guest WAN and when the company staff found it that this guest WAN was FASTER they started using the guest SSID for corporate work.