Unifi bandwidth limit for WAN traffic not LAN?

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TommySharp

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#289058 10-Aug-2021 00:24

I'm getting ready to move rural and am trying to plan how to manage bandwidth usage. At the moment with a 1GB fibre connection I'm not too worried how much data the tv uses when streaming stuff...

But at the new place I'd like to limit it's connect to 5MB or something like that...

With the unifi kit this is possible but from what I understand this will also limit LAN speeds so streaming from the local NAS will also be limited ... Could anyone help me confirm this?

michaelmurfy

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#2757625 10-Aug-2021 00:45

Simple answer - it limits all.

Depending on your budget (and what options you have) you looked at local WISP providers? Many of them offer pretty good speeds and unlimited caps these days. Else there is always Starlink but I'd recommend setting up a failover xDSL connection (for now) while the Starlink network gets more stable.

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fe31nz

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#2757631 10-Aug-2021 01:51

You do WAN bandwidth control on your Internet router, not the WiFi gear. Unless you are using a combined router/WiFi device for the Internet router. You apply the rules to the WAN port and the LAN ports are not directly affected by that. But in most consumer routers, as soon as you enable bandwidth control, the maximum throughput of the router is sharply reduced, as all the packets then get routed using the CPU instead of being offloaded on to the routing hardware. So on my Edgerouter Lite if I enable bandwidth control (Quality Of Service = QoS), then the maximum throughput goes down to around 300 Mbit/s and drops further for each firewall or QoS rule you use. With a normal set of rules, you would expect to only get 200 Mbit/s or less. So doing that on a 1 Gbit/s fibre connection is not a good idea. However, if your WAN connection is less than 200 MBit/s (eg VDSL or ADSL), then it can be useful. The reduction in throughput when QoS is enabled applies to all packets, even those being routed between LAN ports. But if your router has switch ports attached to its LAN ports, the traffic going between the switch ports is unaffected - it works just as though the switch ports were on a separate Ethernet switch box with one of the switch's ports connected to a router LAN port.

I used QoS initially with my old ADSL connection while I was waiting months to get the fibre install done, and it was quite useful. But there is a fundamental problem with QoS - it works at the transmitting end, not the receiving end. So there is no way for your router to control the incoming traffic on the WAN port, except by dropping packets until the transmitter sees a problem and slows its transmitting rate. This does work for TCP connections, but it can take some time - a minute or two - for the transmitter to sort out the right speed. It depends on the particular TCP algorithm being used by the transmitter. For UDP traffic, there is no generic mechanism for this - it depends on the higher level protocol being used for the UDP traffic. If there is no higher level protocol, the UDP packets will just keep arriving as fast as the transmitter sends them and your router will keep dropping lots of them, which is very, very bad for streaming video. For packets transmitted from your network, QoS can do an excellent job of managing the bandwidth, but for most home use, the heavy traffic is incoming, not outgoing. What I found useful was to control the outbound packets so that when my WAN port was busy, there was bandwidth reserved for the ACK packets for the incoming traffic. A basic rule of thumb is that you need about 5-10% of the incoming bandwidth as outbound bandwidth for the ACK packets. If there is heavy outbound traffic (eg backups to cloud servers), that can cause problems with the inbound traffic not being able to get its ACK packets back to the transmitter in time. Prioritising the ACK traffic solved that problem for me, so I could get full bandwidth usage in both directions at the same time.

davidcole

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#2757659 10-Aug-2021 08:12

you can create groups in unifi (under user groups on the controller - legacy ui), and those can be limited on speed, maybe cap.....so your tv could go to a group that is limited.

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TommySharp

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#2757822 10-Aug-2021 11:37

Thanks for replies guys!
ADSL is 2Mbit so will definitely be looking for a wireless provider of hopefully about 50mbit.

But at the same time I'd like to cap netflix on the TV to something like 2Mbit but still allow plex to stream from my home NAS at full speed.

I don't think the Unifi equipment can currently cap certain protocols... It can cap the client but that includes both LAN and WAN so maybe I need to be looking at some other networking gear?

Senecio

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#2757932 10-Aug-2021 12:44

Capping your TV isn’t going to achieve what you want. 1 hour of Netflix streamed in HD will require about 3GB of data. Capping your TV bandwidth isn’t going to change that. It will just buffer for longer before the video starts to play but you’ll still consume 3GB of data for every hour you watch.

TommySharp

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#2757959 10-Aug-2021 13:27

A lot of these streaming services will adjust the nitrate and quality based on the internet connection speed. This help topic implies that Netflix does do the same. To be honest I wouldn't mind if the TV where the kids do most of their watching is capped so Netflix only ever streams in SD 😆
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306