Bandwidth Limits

There are 2 types of bandwidth limits available for us on the 4WiFi Platform which are supported directly by the Mikrotik hardware on your site. These are:

• Simple Limits

• Custom Queues

Simple Limits

These are “hard” limits and are the easiest for the hardware to implement. You have a maximum bandwidth for both Upload and Download rates set against the guest device and the speed is restricted to these values.

These use the lowest amount of CPU of the two options and are suited to sites using lower spec hardware or where user numbers are pushing higher on the scale for the hardware you have implemented.

Custom Queues

These provide the user the ability to “burst” above the hard limits and provides a much better guest experience as a result. This is achieved by utilising some “Queues” within the Mikrotik ecosystem which result in the guest device being able to consume a higher amount of bandwidth for a pre-determined period of time, however if that time limit is reached, the guest will be slowed down in a similar way to Simple Limits above.

The advantages of this method far exceed the improvement to user experience and also can go so far as to decrease the overall bandwidth required for the supply to your site while providing an better guest experience at the same time.

The cost of this comes at a significant increase in CPU and Memory requirement on the Mikrotik hardware at your site. We would recommend not using this method if you are using one of the lower-end controllers as it is likely to cause negative impacts to your guest experience if the CPU usage of your controller become too high. Our staff can recommend a controller to suit the expectations of your site based on estimated user numbers.

The formatting of the Custom Queue is CRITICAL, we have a CustomQueue Calculator if you understand what you are doing enough, but recommend consulting our staff or your Reseller Partner before attempting these for the first time. The format for these are:

from the point of view of the Hotspot Controller (so "rx" is guest upload, and "tx" is guest download).