Exactly. Many members, including myself, are limited by our CPE links during off hours, and by the backhaul during high traffic hours.
3 items
1) Co-locating some essential services (like netflix) might be of help.
That’s a good idea, will bring that up with the admins.
Netflix is here now, but many folks seem to use “O2 TV Air”, which is a way to watch ordinary cable packages over any Internet connection (not just from O2). SD streams are 3Mbit and HD 6Mbit. Weirdly, they don’t pace out their data but there’s a characteristic “pulsing” of the streams every 5 seconds that when I see it on the router's throughput graph I know, yep, that’s O2 TV. I’ll find out if their on-demand stuff has such a co-location option.
Backhaul upgrades are coming into focus gradually, and upgrading those ALIX boxes which are tanks but...tanks.
I think some of the higher costs come from physical installations / placement rights. Surprising what towers can cost.
3) Philosophically I vastly prefer the concept of "everyone sharing
the network", rather than rate plans, to create some market tension as
to the available bandwidth at any given time of day.
Agree wholeheartedly. Rate limiting members isn’t necessary for a non-profit (no profit motive) and especially if we can get fairness right, there’s no technical reason to do it that I know of either.
ubnt did add at least airtime fairness to airos a year or two back. It
was not on by default. Their "TDMA" qos system was this insane mess of
sfq rules when I tore it apart.... 8 years back.
I don’t know what they’re doing in their newer AC stuff, but I'm surprised by what appears to be ~6-8ms latency under load on the NanoStation 5 AC Loco’s I got for the camp’s backhaul. Is it really that good? This is in contrast to the 50+ms I see with rrul_be on the NanoStation M5 (without controlling the queue). This test is straight AP to AP though, with probably 1 flow up and 1 down plus ping, so I want to get 2-4 more of these and do rrul_be through the Ethernet ports, to get more flows and UDP, and see how it looks then.