Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Mobile Post: Odd Guest Wi-Fi

What's wrong with this picture? Taken at a local urban restaurant.

9 comments:

  1. Download 1.08Mbps Upload 13.97Mbps :-O hahahaha

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  2. Could that be a Cisco WLC? Heavy traffic into the site? In my experience I've seen Cisco WLCs setup to limit guest users speed, the download speed only that is.

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  3. Upstream > Downstream... usually it's the opposite in asymetrical Internet service. Well, this connection could be used for hosting a server :-)

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  4. Could be a PtP connection feeding the hotspot with fresnel issue?

    kurt

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  5. odd that they are possibly serving it via 4G
    4G using separate bands for downstream/upstream data communications and perhaps the carrier is anticipating this like Steve Williams stated regarding typical ISPs but since data is heavier on the downstream to client side, they use this model.

    downstream priority queuing only forgot to turn on that pesky upstream priority queuing cap?

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  6. > What's wrong with this picture?

    You have 33% battery left and you're screwing around with Wi-Fi ;-)

    Dan

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  7. Thanks for your comments everyone! I actually don't know the root cause since I was only a customer of the establishment. But if I had to conjecture, my bet would be on a configured rate-limiting policy that was only working in the downstream direction. Given the urban location and bandwidth, I'm also going to guess that it was either a cable modem or DSL circuit. This could lead to a very plausible second cause - if a cable modem was in use the downstream bandwidth could be constrained by other neighbors connected to the same cable segment and sharing the capacity. The upstream was lightly used, which is typical, and therefore offered much higher bandwidth.

    Now that I think about it, this was just a restaurant/bar, so they probably had minimal network management occurring. The second explanation (cable modem) is likely the answer.

    Dan - I run the battery until it's DRY! Hehe!

    Andrew

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  8. I've actually seen that a few times. Too funny!

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  9. This would most likely be a Cisco Wireless Solution with rate limiting configured for the guest wireless network. With cisco's controller rate limiting you can only limit the download speed.

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