Starting a new Wireless ISP
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hi, im from the philippines and i will be putting up a wireless isp here in our province, can anyone guide me on this and give me tips on how to manage at least 20-50 clients. we currently have a 2 mbps upload and 2 mbps download..is it enough? how can i manage the bandwidth and maybe use a cache and rardius server..thank you…
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Wow. 2up and 2down, that sucks. It’s do-able though, don't worry about running out of bandwidth. You will just have to incorporate some filtering.
You will want a caching server, like squid. Run it in transparent mode. Make sure you have a good amount of space for the cache, since you have little bandwidth for 50 clients you will want to hold on to that cache as long as you can, especially for YouTube videos and such.
Block p2p traffic! It will only take 1 person to kill your entire ISP. Setup QoS and catch all unknown traffic as p2p and throttle it hardcore. When you get more bandwidth lift the restrictions on p2p, because no one likes a comcrap wannabe.
As far as DHCP leases are you going to be handing out routable IPs or is this all going to be private IP address space? If using private IPs make sure to use an A class network. Can you really hand out private ip addresses and still be considered an ISP?
Since clients are going to be connecting wirelessly you will want to run a radius server. You can also keep track of their account and if they are current on payment by using this method.
What APs will you be using? And how far is your broadcasting area? Is it over 2 miles?
Will you allow VoIP traffic and video streaming, if so then you may want to consider more bandwidth, more like 100 up and 100 down at minimum.
Not sure why you would want to run an ISP with 2 up and 2 down. Can’t really justify charging people more than 2 cents for that, a year. -
Wow. 2up and 2down, that sucks. It’s do-able though, don't worry about running out of bandwidth. You will just have to incorporate some filtering.
You will want a caching server, like squid. Run it in transparent mode. Make sure you have a good amount of space for the cache, since you have little bandwidth for 50 clients you will want to hold on to that cache as long as you can, especially for YouTube videos and such.
Block p2p traffic! It will only take 1 person to kill your entire ISP. Setup QoS and catch all unknown traffic as p2p and throttle it hardcore. When you get more bandwidth lift the restrictions on p2p, because no one likes a comcrap wannabe.
As far as DHCP leases are you going to be handing out routable IPs or is this all going to be private IP address space? If using private IPs make sure to use an A class network. Can you really hand out private ip addresses and still be considered an ISP?
Since clients are going to be connecting wirelessly you will want to run a radius server. You can also keep track of their account and if they are current on payment by using this method.
What APs will you be using? And how far is your broadcasting area? Is it over 2 miles?
Will you allow VoIP traffic and video streaming, if so then you may want to consider more bandwidth, more like 100 up and 100 down at minimum.
Not sure why you would want to run an ISP with 2 up and 2 down. Can’t really justify charging people more than 2 cents for that, a year.I'm doing the same right now ( Don't mean to Hi-Jack the thread) I'm running 20 clients on a private IP network using a 400 Mhz pc and Pfsense And another 10 client and growing network on a 400 Mhz box with Pfsense. The Opt1 interfaces are setup with a wireless link as a static route between the two networks.
What hardware size would you folks recommend for these PC's. I'm thinking of getting a couple of dell gx280's 3 GHz or so and put in 250 Gb drives. I would like to run the anti-virus plugin as well. But I don't really want to dump the coin right now for a dual core New box. Both connections are 8000 kb down and 800 kb up.
Thanks
Allan -
The hardware you describe should handle the load with little effort.
Here is a hardware chart found in the pfsense book:
CPU Onboard Max Realtek Max Pro/1000 Max
Pentium II N/A 51 Mbps 64 Mbps
Pentium 3 700mhz N/A 84 Mbps 217 Mbps
Pentium 4 1.7 Ghz N/A 93 Mbps 365 MbpsSo as you can see your hardware will be fine. I don't think you will need dual core unless the box is going to be doing many things at once, more than AV, Squid, and pf.
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Hardware: My connection is 5500/720. I run squid, freeswitch, and do lots of traffic shaping, with voip and torrents on the LAN. A 500 MHz Geode is more than enough hardware for this. I could handle 3 times the speed comfortably.
Bandwidth: The more the better, obviously, but when I worked for a wISP a couple years back I observed that we were able to oversell our bandwidth about 30x without too much trouble. In other words, we could sell 1000/300 to 90 clients on a 3000/1000 connection before our pipe really started to max out. Using that math, I would estimate that you could provide 1000/1000 to roughly 60 clients on a 2/2 mpbs pipe before performance would start to suffer at the client's end.