Traffic Shaping: WAN speed "fair use" max 5% over allocated bandwidth

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Dear all:

I have an offer for fiber internet access with 1000MBit/s up- and downlink. The pricing model is, the contract has a fraction of that as fixed bandwidth paid (eg. 50 or 100 or 200MBit/s), and there is a steep cost for overusing the volume IF YOU USE IT FOR MORE than 5% of the time.
The provider explains they are monitoring the volume in 5-minute blocks and count the 5-minute-blocks that you are over the bandwidth/volume limit, and you may over-use basically 8.640 5-minute-blocks per month.
[Basically you may exceed your paid speed up to the line speed for 36 hours per month...]

I've searched traffic shaping tutorials and examples but I couldn't find anything meaningful for that situation (apologies if I missed it!). Any hints appreciated! [And yes, the https://openwrt.org/doc/howto/traffic.control is not there!]

Two questions:

  1. I have bad feelings about e.g. automatic software downloads and no ingress rates. Eg. say we have 20 windows clients, and on Microsoft patch day every PC starts automatically downloading some gigabyte software blob. In this scenario, all PCs are requesting a download and the Microsoft servers are pumping downloads full-speed. If I'm not throttling ingress, this may be a problem. Throttling ingress means I have to put VOIP-traffic, SSH and terminal access into different bins already, but is this enough?

  2. Are there any tutorials/examples out there that can automatically increase traffic limits in times of need? And scale down when not needed anymore/ 60 minutes are used up over the past 24 hours?

Best,
Mathias

2

sounds like a scam... speed quotas/limitations are a provider/commercial level construct and for residential users only exist to make money...

1 Like
3

There's no way you can be sure your accounting scheme agrees with theirs. Ask them to remove this "feature" and give you a conventional limited speed/unlimited use plan. And/or set your speed continuously to below where you would ever be charged extra.