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directconnect
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Streaming & Hotels Free Wifi

Mon Jun 13, 2016 12:01 am

We have quite a few hotel properties we've been doing a long time.  We use all Mikrotik's for routers, and Ubiquiti for Wireless to the properties (and on-property WiFi too).

The problem that's been growing over the years is the number of "Free WiFi" hotels are getting more and more complaints about poor service due to streaming and during streaming.  We used to use hotspot with a PCQ per-connection at about 1Mb with a 10Mb burst (with a 2M threshold) over 1 minute.  It seems though that Netflix either is identifying these burst connections as enough to stream HD and the burst is just enough to handle it.  But when you multiply this times more rooms & users, and suddenly 5 or 10 devices eating up 30Mbps for 4 or 6 hours at a time leaves little for anyone else, and as soon as others start to fair share the queue, the streamers complain about buffering.  We're slowly upgrading them to faster speeds and more PTP delivery, but the management doesn't want to pay more and doesn't understand why "unlimited fast Free WiFI" shouldn't be a viable model for their economy hotel.

We know Netflix and Hulu can stream under 1Mbps - I've set with a Mikrotik router, 4 devices at my house, and set a PCQ as low as 256kbps dedicated CIR and the stream still played without buffering (no burst, minimum quality automatically kicked in).  I'd like to do this kind of thing with my PCQ's on the hotel Mikrotik's where the streaming services will detect a "low speed" but not force everyone to be low speed on normal surfing.  I thought burst would do this but obviously it's not working as well as I'd hoped - the streams kick into high gear with the burst and every few seconds blasts the system with a big spike and then goes low.  A few people doing this never was a problem, now it's constantly a problem.  You can see the bursts kicking each streamer, and each streamer is a new cycle of burst spikes.  After a while the spikes become a big flat line.

Apparently the cell companies can do this with their "unlimited" streaming packages where the service is automatically forcing it to low while still able to do 4G LTE with 15 Mbps.

If someone could help point me in the right queue configuration it would REALLY help.  I don't want to "block" streaming, just stop them from hogging all the bandwidth.  If all my streamers would kick into 1Mbps or less mode it would be a great compromise for everybody.  It's more than just an issue over capacity, because even if I had 10 Mbps per room (1Gbps DIA fiber or licensed wireless to a hotel) the WiFi itself wouldn't be able to deliver that in 3 channels of 2.4 ghz - there's really no property where most of the AP's antennas can't see each other through a few hallway walls even on the lowest power settings, etc.  Most of the cheap streaming sticks are 2.4 ghz only so adding 5ghz isn't really an option to fix the problem on the WiFi Side.
 
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rcourtney
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Re: Streaming & Hotels Free Wifi

Thu Jun 16, 2016 4:26 am

You can limit using either Unifi or RouterOS. 
Unifi might be easier.
 
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ZeroByte
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Re: Streaming & Hotels Free Wifi

Thu Jun 16, 2016 4:49 am

Make sure that the burst threshold is comfortably lower than the max-limit so that streamers won't keep bursting over and over.
 
directconnect
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Re: Streaming & Hotels Free Wifi

Fri Jul 01, 2016 8:59 pm

But I've tried going the "threshold less than MIR" route (meaning I set the PCQ MIR to 1M, the burst to 10M, and the threshold to 900k) but I seem to lose the ability to make the 10M burst longer.  I've played with the burst time, I'd like to be around a full minute on 10M burst.  Enough to keep the speed testers happy, you know.  But on the flip side, the initial streamer will think it's HD capable and then rebuffer after the minute.  Kinda annoying.   And the nature of the streamers seems to be very burst friendly - they don't just hit the connection for 1.5 Mbps continuous, they hit it for 10Mbps, then nothing, back to 10Mbps, then nothing.  

Really, what would be ideal would be some way to use packet marking rules to grab heavy use connections (AKA Torrent/Roku/FireTV/etc boxes) and after a set data limit, add them to a "streaming" address list.  I may end up having to do this further up the path in a Radius server or with a script.  

Until recently, a captive portal kept 90% of streamers at bay because they couldn't login via the web portal.  Now they have the ability to do that on newer units.  In fact, I dropped captive portal at 2 new properties because single-password WPA2 WiFi was easier to login to and people think its "more secure".  Plus all the recent "secure" home pages, people would call and complain right away because they couldn't get online.  And doing HTTPS captive portal redirect now makes you look like a hacker ("THIS WEB PAGE MAY NOT BE SECURE!! DO NOT ENTER PERSONAL INFORMATION" on Chrome/Firefox/IE/Edge).  SSL is what makes your connection secure not a shared WPA2 password - but people are dumb as ever despite all the technology.  But all these issues are making captive portal for single-shared password login less appealing.

Eventually I want to move towards a virtual local network configuration where hotel users  can create an account, login using WPA2 enterprise on all their devices, and all their devices see each other (printers, games, phones) and they act like a local network.  Also helps group the "room usage" into one big group of devices rather than 500 individual devices for 200 rooms.

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