Community of RV'ers battling a few Insufferable Network Hogs, and me, the only employee that can Help!

[donquixote88]

Hello to all the Tech Gurus!

Having serious issues that once solved will help an entire community of 75-100 RV'ers suffering from domain-hogs and ineffective networking peripherals! Please Help!

Okay so,

I have not exactly been in the "know" as far as tech stuff for a few years; I used to fiddle with Linux and open source stuff like Aero_Lite and Tor and whatnot, but have been so involved in the pursuit of other things of late that I'm not exactly "up on my tech saavy." But now, this is becoming a problem.

I started working at this RV Campground in SC as the groudnskeeper almost a year ago, and it seems like as far as networking goes it's just a free-for-all... I'm just sick of it!

It's set up as 3 Open Networks that residents have access to (as paying customers): A, B, and C; as well as repeaters set up randomly throughout the community. On Friday nights such as this, when the servers are loaded, it just becomes a total mess!

As someone with authority within the park, and hopefully enough understanding to learn to sync this thing up, I would like to gain control over these three servers, because, no doubt, there are a host of other 'Tech-Savvy' residents who probably have been here a while longer, and have control over the traffic, I don't really know. I know for a fact that at least one is using a 'Booster' and there's probably more hardware being used, as well.

Alas, I'm fed up with not being able to connect to the Wifi over the weekends because of the discrepancies, and need some good advice.

In the beginning I didn't have much money, so I bought a cheap-o repeater (+/- $14 on amazon), but even with that connected from 20 yards away from network C, I still cant even get the bandwidth necessary to stream music, when others are probably staying up late playing Multiplayer XBox Games! It's Sickening!

Short and sweet: I'm looking for a low-cost solution to this problem, I have a feeling it has to do with latency, but that's just a suspicion, I don't really know. Too many conflicting signals throughout the park. The owners have specifically instructed Comcast to set it up as 'open,' so that the staff (myself included) wouldn't be hassled with people calling constantly asking about passwords and the likes.

At first I thought it would be a cool idea to setup a cloud server and get all the networks running in synchronicity with a Unix/Linux based platform, assuming that there would be a host of different open-source programs that I could use to increase productivity, and overall efficiency, but since then I have spoken to the parent of a good friend of mine, another Tech Guru, who told me that I may consider buying a bunch of inexpensive (~$30) 'Ada-Fruit-Raspberries,' and set them up throughout the campground, and that that may solve my problem.

I don't really know what the best way to go about solving this problem is, all I know is that, as a resident, as well as employee here, I would like to be the Head-Administrator as far as these 3 networks go. I have the upper hand as far as access to the actual hardware whenever I so desire, because I have the keys, and these other chumps do not, but I know there is a lot of interference and poor connectivity throughout the campgrounds.

I am willing to do the research and due-diligence, whatever that may entail, even with several other things on my plate, but would be SO HELPFUL to know the best strategy to defeat these hacks and overcome these networking issues, that I may not waste any time.

At my disposal I have One 2016 Lenovo Ideapad Laptop, as well as a small Asus webbook that I bought a while ago, that I believe still turns on. The Lenovo is Windows 10, the Asus is Windows 7, I have no problem installing Linux onto either of these (or both) to get the campground running Wifi more efficiently, but would rather use that one program that lets you open an ISO of a kernel in a separate window shell (what was it again?), and then use that to install Unix or whatever. Also I do have some funds to spare at the moment, so it just may be the right time to do a sweep.

Any input will be greatly appreciated, I can't do my own research quite yet, because of lack of connectivity, but it's probably best that I get knowledgeable about the problems that I am dealing with beforehand, anyway, as I don't really know what could be the issue, I'm just assumning. I'm just a hobbyist after all, I am relying on the Gurus here at Tom's Hardware for the Pro-Standard!

Thanks in Advance.

Chris

 

[jsmithepa]

TL;DR

1. With that many users, I hope you have some sort of QOS function somewhere on the head box, allowing everybody to have fair access and preventing hoggers.

2. Make sure you are not overloading consumer grades access points, u may need more of them, or move to business-grades.

 

[little_me]

As Jsmithepa said, it's a matter of QoS setup.

70 to 100 people.
what is the total bandwidth of the connection to outside? average that for everyone and you get what should work.
Wifi boosters will just boost the signal, making connection better, in cases of contested bandwidth, I fear they might be the biggest potential users.
If everyone is watching stuff at 1080P fullhd, it's like 8mbit/sec for everyone, multiplied by 100... hopefully total bandwidth is in gigabit range or.. bottlenecks will happen no matter what routes/repeaters/AP you use.

Consumer grade repeaters, Accesspoints and such usually work only with up to 15 to 30 connections at most, at which point they start to drop off the other ones and get clogged up.

As recommended above, Business grade toys usually have quite lot better quality of service (bandwidth allocation based on type of content) options and can also serve more devices without getting clogged up.
Personal experience is that Aruba is quite good. Other brands exist and can be as good as better.

 

[bill001g]

You have to first determine where the big problem is. It generally will be over use of the wifi radio frequencies or over utilization of the internet connection.

So your first step is when there are problems to see how much traffic is passing through your router to the isp....if you have mulitple ISP connections this makes it even harder.

If the internet connection itself is not overloaded then you look at the wifi. You are pretty limited in what you can do in the wifi. Most things are locked away inside the radio firmware because the FCC knows people will change things that cause the radios to violate regulations.

You goal is to have as many radio sources as possible to help spread the load. If you only have one radio source there is not much you can do. What you want to work toward is a design that industry uses for buildings. They have a bunch of AP spread out over the building. They assign radio channels to each so they do not conflict. This is best forcing them to 20mhz so you have more non overlapping radio frequencies. The most common devices have a 2.4g and 5g radio so you could assign 2 different radio channels to the same box. This is already fairly complex so I would leave it to the users to figure out which is the best for them to connect to.

Now if you are overloading your internet connection that to a point you can do more. It is somewhat limited because many time the actual data loss and delays are happening at the ISP office where their equipment is trying to fit all the data into the connection to your location. You can't really fix this problem on your end, to a point you can reduce it but if you have someone running abusive software like bit torrent that is designed to bypass restrictions there is little you can do.

Again just some general guidance for you to think about. What you can do is put a device...normal some kind of firewall..that you can limit traffic on. Most commercial boxes are likely out of you budget but it can be done with a dual nic pc and one of the many free firewalls. This device needs to be placed between the actual ISP connection and your WIFI so it can intercept all the traffic.

It depends how much effort you want to go though. This is generically called QoS but it is really a subset of that called traffic shaping. If we look at how cellphone companies offer "unlimited" that can slow down after you hit a limit but only during times of congestion. The way this is done is traffic has QoS markings applied to it. You would set all traffic to some value say "01" for default. You would then check the user to see if they have hit their limit and if they have you reset the traffic to say "02". Then you set up a traffic shaper that say send all traffic marked "01" first.

QoS and traffic control is one of the most advanced network topic there is so it will take some study. The key reason companies like F5 can sell a traffic shaper for $200,000 is they have spent a lot of time making it easy for people to configure. Free firewall software like pfsense can do all this and there are lots of examples but you will have to spend quit a bit of time messing with this. It is very hard at first because there are so many options you can set many which do nothing if you are not careful.

 

[kanewolf]

I would also add that you need to move as much of your infrastructure to wired as possible. No radio repeaters. Just WIFI access points and wired connectivity back to a central location. That might mean having some outdoor rated switches to extend the wired segments beyond 100 meters or using fiber.

Think about investing in a "system" like the Ubiquiti UnIFI. Their software and hardware allow a lot of insight into your network. It sounds like that is something that is missing today.

One other possible issue you are facing is DHCP space. You could be running out of DHCP addresses because of the total number of devices you have to support.

 

[Karadjgne]

What I've found in my house is most of any bandwidth issues lie with Apple products, iPhone, iPad etc. For some reason Apple feels like they must guarantee performance by hogging as much bandwidth per device as possible. It was instantly obvious when my daughter would come home and bring her iPhone, 6 android devices had as much access as her single device. And she didn't even have to be actively using it, just accessing the wifi shoved all the androids to one side. Got to the point where I had to specify exactly how much bandwidth was available to any device, thereby limiting Apple hogging.