One of our customers was complaining because they constantly had to buy top-ups for their broadband.
We converted their home network to a fully managed system with a Mikrotik router at the core and Ubiquiti Unifi Wireless access points.
The benefit of the Mikrotik is that it has a good set of diagnostics and graphing facilities. We quickly identified two problems.
The total of downloads from tablets was very high and one Amazon device was using 90% of the monthly allowance.
The Amazon device alone was capable of downloading all of the monthly allowance in 3 days!
The Mikrotik RouterBoards also have a facility to set quota by device or traffic type. We limited the Amazon device to 2MB/s and also set up an automatic share of the remainder of the broadband across all of the other devices. In our test, iPlayer was the culprit however all streaming caused high bandwidth. It seems that the software will try to download the highest definition video it can, even on slow links or where the TV is connected with LowDef cables such as SCART.
There was no difference in picture quality and yet it would now take 30 days of viewing before the Amazon device could use all of the allowance!
Now everyone gets a fair share of the bandwidth and the whole family are happy browsers! They can get their homework completed and adults can watch their favourite show at the end of a busy day.
Andisa can also manage the network remotely, so when there is a problem we can easily fix it.
The problem was solved by implementing a managed network. It just goes to show how much we rely on the internet and just how important it is to set up a network properly!
