Hello,
I'm reaching out for tips and suggestions that people have to balance their network and bandwidth usage in a school environment that uses 1-1 iPads with staff and teachers and laptops for our staff.
We have fairly recently installed an EdgeMax PoE router and are using Unifi AP Pro access points in our classrooms. Our router goes to a Cisco SG200-26P switch and then it branches off into several 8 port tough switches in different parts of our building with a couple APs plugged into each one for PoE.
Overall things are going well but we have some instances where our data usage gets quite high and we get some users losing connectivity.
I currently have our wifi set with throttling through user groups in our Unifi Controller software to help manage bandwidth, DHCP is handled through our router along with DNS. We use OpenDNS for our security filter to manage access to content that is either inappropriate or for stuff like streaming music that is not needed.
We don't have a big school, just 7 classrooms, but the teachers are really into the multimedia interactivity of the iPads and so I'm looking for suggestions to help us balance things out.
For example: I have our Staff bandwidth currently set to 7000 kpbs and our students set to 3000 kbps throttles. With that in place, our EdgeMax router is currently showing bandwidth utilization of between 14 Mbps - 35 Mbps. Once we get above 25 Mpbs or so it seems we start to get users getting kicked off the wifi and having to reconnect. At this moment we have 117 wifi devices connected to our network.
What have you all done to help manage bandwidth utilization in your environments? Does anyone use the VLAN by SSID? What about the throttles on user groups? Is there a good value to set them to that people have found works well to keep things moving along fast enough but not so high that you get devices using too much data at once?
If I post my config for our router here can I have it reviewed to make sure something isn't glaringly incorrect in the settings? I used one of hte basic wizards to set it up so I'm not expecting anythign to be incorrect but that doesn't mean it won't be.
I am happy to share any details of our setup to help hash through this. These forums are great and any advice or experience or suggestions or straight up instruction is very appreciated.
Thank you in advance.