- Adam Thurgar
Wireless QoS and Ubiquiti
A friend of mine has a holiday house about 2 hours out of the city in a valley. No mobile phone reception and only a satellite modem for internet, limited to 150GB/month. The problem that they have is that when they rent out the place for a weekend or a wedding that the guests use up all the internet usage, either downloading movies or online gaming etc. They needed an ability to manage their wireless network better, so they asked me to help. They were using an Apple Airport Extreme as their router and wireless. But this has no Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities. Quality of Service (QoS) is an advanced feature in wireless networks that prioritizes internet traffic for applications, online gaming, Ethernet LAN ports, or specified MAC addresses to minimize the impact of busy bandwidth. When I investigated further it appeared that most wireless routers only did this by MAC address, which didn't solve the problem as you wouldn't know the MAC addresses of guests devices. The only devices that seemed to be able to manage QoS differently were from Ubiquiti Networks. I remembered that Troy Hunt had done some youtube videos on setting up these networks so I was about to get a crash training course about the Unifi range of products. The steps that I went through will be the basis of the next few blogs. Hopefully you can avoid the mistakes that I made.