I have an RB2011UAS with firmware 3.04 and routeros 5.25 and license level 5

We have 30Mb fiber up and down and we are constantly spiking to max out the download. When this happens, packets are being dropped. I currently have no queues setup and I am thinking I can use a basic queue to stop dropping packets and actually buffer the packets instead since these are spikes and not constant traffic at that level.

I was considering changing the bandwidth entry on the Ethernet port (this is a gigabit port) to 30M but when I do this in winbox the entry goes red. It appears that it will only let me use what is shown in the drop down.

I am not even sure if this will help, but from what I understand, if the system does not know that the bandwidth limit is at 30M then it will just drop packets when this is exceeded.

Can someone help?

Bump

Have you at least tried something? Even I haven't personal experience with it I would set queues with a bit smaller throughput than your limit to keep smooth flow and prevent choking and packet loss. I have never needed to solve such situation as my wans do not drop packets if overloaded.

All of the queues I have read about talk about dropping packets when they get overloaded. I have also read that this is due to the fact that the Mikrotik does not know what the limitation of the ethernet port is unless you set the transmit and receive limitations. I cannot set them for anything more than 10mbps in a dropdown (it errors if I try to set it for 30mpbs). If the Mikrotik thinks it is capable of sending 100M or 1G because it is an ethernet port set to unlimited, it will drop packets if the bandwidth is set to 30M by the provider. I wouldn't be posting on here if I had not already done research to find the answer myself.

If I am incorrect and someone has a solution, it would be very helpful.

That's where you can use the queue tree to create a queue for a specific interface and control what the router sends out of that given interface.
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Queue

Based off of what you have said, you can set two queues, one with a parent of your WAN port, this will be your upload queue. And one with a parent of your LAN port, this will be your download queue.

Thanks Feklar. The documentation you sent is the first I have seen that speaks of rate equalizing (scheduler). I appreciate your time and I will look into this more closely. Hopefully I can find an example or two to work with.

Thanks again!