Wireless ISPs
Hello "I work for an ISP serving Michigan's Upper Peninsula (U.P. Logon) that provides wireless, DSL, and cable connections to over 1,000 customers. The NetEqualizer has worked just as advertised and the support team has been awesome when any questions have come up. When we switched over to VLANs on our network, they worked with us at no charge to upgrade their solution in order to support us. I was looking for a one-time investment with long-term benefits and NetEqualizer has been just that." --Chris Gotstein, U.P. Logon --Jim Pazarena, qcislands net --Michael Stimson, Texas Air Net We had a pretty good connection aging rule set in MikroTik, but lost
bandwidth by having to define a pipe size first, then setting queues within
that defined pipe. Doesn't work particularly well for wireless where the
pipe size tends to change a bit with changing RF conditions during the day.
Also had to put too many rules in too many routers so it was getting pretty
difficult to maintain. I saw a mention or two of NetEqualizer on a couple of forums, and pretty
much brushed it off as more BS. We already had an Etinc bandwidth manager
gathering dust and didn't want the same thing happening again. Well, about two weeks ago we got fed up enough to give NetEqualizer a call.
Had a couple of interesting chats, decent tech sales conversations, very
little push from them, careful to set reasonable expectations etc. They said
it works, its completely transparent, holds traffic levels within 10-15% of
what you want, prioritizes interactive stuff including VoIP and requires
very little setup and even less maintenance. It manages traffic patterns
only and doesn't try to sniff packets to detect PtP. They were also very clear that "less is more". Don't put in a bunch of rules
to micromanage, just let it do its thang. So we bought one last Friday. The 45Mbit version, cost about $3500 or so
including some basic support and maintenance. Nice 1U case, but quite a
noisy fan. Showed up Tuesday morning, which is pretty good shipping time
considering it went through customs to get here. Plugged it in around lunchtime Tuesday into a managed switch where we could
easily cut it in and out of our main feed trunk. Left if out of the traffic
stream while we read through the quickstart guide, then took about 5 mins to
give it an IP address and put in the basic three rules. Made a few entries
to exempt various servers from connection limits, gave three or four
customer IPs "priority host" exemptions and left it alone for a while to
make sure that the magic smoke wasn't going to suddenly escape. Flipped switch ports to put the NetEq into the traffic stream about 5pm
Tuesday. Still had a bunch of MT routers running rule sets, including the
main gateway with a global daytime PtP ban. WELL! It settled in very gracefully within a few minutes, and we could see
the connection count to the Internet gradually dropping off, while bandwidth
utilization started to smooth out to about 2 Mbit less than the 21 Mbit we
had set. You could watch IP pair delay "penalties" being applied, increased,
decreased and removed in the log. Bursts were still allowed to bring the
peak just over 22 Mbit, and the upload side settled at about 1 Mbit less
than the 6 Mbits we set. Again, bursts were allowed to around 7 Mbits. The
Internet felt great!! Over the next few hours we disable all the existing MT rule sets, including
the global gateway rules for PtP. Bandwidth utilization still looked
relatively smooth, cruising around the Net felt great, VoIP worked fine,
everything was peachy. The next day we figured out that a couple of big customers running over VPN
tunnels needed priority exemptions, as tunnels look like one big lump of
abuse from a NetEqualizer viewpoint. We also set some priorities with bandwidth caps for big clients running
server farms. And waited for the shoe to drop.... And waited, and waited. Calls to our
tech support dropped off, nobody was complaining about throughput, and we
waited some more. Even PtP worked great during the day as it was allowed to
use any unused bandwidth that "real-time" applications didn't need. And we're still waiting four days later. This device is about the closest thing to black magic we've seen in years.
It just plain works. I've removed about half of the few config rules I put
in to start, we simply don't need them. The only thing you have to watch is
connection limits on servers, and make exemptions for big customers routing
all their traffic through tunnels. That's it. To put this in context, we're handling just under 30 Mbits total flow, and
sit at about 2400 pps each way during the day, dropping off out of business
hours. We have an evening residential burst to about 70% of our daytime max.
We're seeing about 1300 concurrent IP connection pairs during the day down
to around 800 in the evening. That's with roughly 750 customers representing
5000+ total seats. 900 MHz customers normally get 3 Mbit or so, and pretty
much everyone else gets 5+, so they get grumpy fast if bandwidth drops off. It only took 10-15 customers running encrypted PtP on Port 80 to ruin our
lives, and the trend they represented was horrifying. Over the last six
months, our bandwidth utilization has gone up at least 50% higher than can
be accounted for by customer growth. Obviously we have no connection with NetEqualizer beyond being a very happy
customer.
Their FAQ here http://www.netequalizer.com/tsfaq.htm pretty much says it
all." George Morris We've got about 1000 subscribers, but our circuits have been limited to just 12 megabits. Without the NetEqualizer, we would have been forced to reduce our subscriber count and cut our revenue. But, with the NetEqualizer in place, the automated shaping just kicks in when needed and things are running smoothly without a bandwidth upgrade or subscriber cutback. The best part is that NetEqualizer has freed up manpower, thus allowing us to grow out (our) business. In this latest release, we've noticed that speed and efficiency are even better than before. I'm also a fan of the interface. Its basic, but simple to use. To top it off, NTOP, the reporting tool, is now on
a separate disk partition, which just shows that these guys are on the ball, constantly making improvements and doing everything they can to make the NetEqualizer a solid reliable tool. ...
I just wanted to let you guys at Netequalizer know how much I depend
on my NE2000. I am a small ISP with about 360 customers and I would be
lost without the Netequalizer. The people there are always very
friendly and quick to respond. Keep up the great work.
Thanks
Dave Barker
Broadlinc Communications
"I bought my first NetEqualizers in 2004 when upgrading from a 2 Mbit to a 10 Mbit line. I'd been using Packeteer, but the NetEqualizer has proven much more affordable and efficient. It's been low maintenance, customizable, and the personal tech support has been great. The lower cost allowed me to put units throughout my expansive network, which is the Westernmost ISP in Canada. The price was what motivated me to test the system and the performance has kept me coming back."
"We're a family-owned ISP in Ellis County Texas with over 1800 customers. We've been using NetEqualizer since 2005 and have been very satisfied. It worked great from the start and has been reliable and effective as our company has grown. We now have 26 towers and are proudly the fastest WISP in Texas!"
"We've been having problems with encrypted BitTorrent running on Port 80.
uTorrent, Azureus, BitComet clients in particular were impossible to track
down automatically, so finding them by hand and putting them in jail was
starting to take more and more admin time.
Internet Free Planet, Inc.
