- Trendal Toews
- November 13, 2023
This week we deployed LibreQoS on a big LAN that we manage. It’s a road course track with a large paddock area almost 1/2 mile x 300′ wide. The WiFi setup is awkward at best due to limited points of power. All AP’s are on one side of the paddock area and therefore the AP to client ranges goes from 40′ straight down (beneath the light poles) to 300+ feet out/away. The Unifi system was still running a basic limiter at 12×5 for each WiFi client that was on the network when we inherited management of it. There is no fiber/cabling in the ground, so 90% of the WiFi traffic is uplinked via airMax gear. And the racing clients that come in bring a ton of their own RF. Hotspots, Starlink kits, and even extensive Ubiquiti airMax networks for long range connectivity of their own around the area.
For this event we increased the site capacity to 300×300 Mbps knowing that the WiFi system as a whole would likely not be able to max that out. We installed a Lanner Electronic FW-7525D running Ubuntu and LibreQos just downstream of the gateway router (EdgeRouter 12) and removed the Unifi shaper setting, leaving all WiFi clients now on the default Unlimited group. There are 3 different VLAN/subnets on the network. Public WiFi, Corporate LAN (wired only), and Medical. In LibreQoS we manually created a simple network tree. Main SITE with 3 children, one for each subnet. These we gave 300×300 capacity to. For the Public WiFi, it’s a /20 network, we broke that up into 16 /24’s and gave each group 250×250. The Corporate LAN is a /24 and we broke it up into 4 subnets with 75×75 each, and finally the Medical /24 was also broken into 4 subnets and given 25×25 Mbps each. The Public WiFi generated the bulk of the traffic.
The network was moved to LiberQoS the day prior to the race teams arriving, so the traffic levels were changing, but in the included Unifi AP re-transmission graph, you can see the not-so-subtle change when we brought LibreQoS onboard. Testing on site showed a dramatically improved responsiveness to the WiFi, even during peak use during the event.
The other screenshot is the LibreQoS LTS (Long Term Stats [Beta]) showing the shaper nodes system stats for 24 hours of the event.
Although we did not do an in depth survey, we have not received any complaints about the WiFi quality this year, Many thanks to the LibreQoS team for a very nice system that brought a definite increase in stability to the network.
Trendal Toews
Stream IT Networks LLC
251 North Villa Avenue
Willows, CA 95988
530-330-0746
trendal.toews@streamitnet.com
support@streamitnet.com