Need help choosing a router to cap users

woodepic · December 28, 2018

Hi, I am planning to get wifi at my cabin via the Netgear LB1121 lte modem. However I am looking for a router (actually a router, not the 3 in 1 combo units that everyone calls routers) that allows me to set daily bandwidth and speed caps on users. I am familiar with ubiquiti's gear, I plan on using one of their AP's for this cabin, but as far as I'm aware their routers don't allow data caps on a user by user base.

Here's my ideal setup:

-Default is a capped user, everyone who types in the wifi password will get this treatment until I manually edit their mac addresses in the router to unlimited. We only need a few uncapped devices.

-Users have access to full internet speed (about 40mb/s over lte) until they hit a certain data usage for that day. (lets say 300mb). As soon as they hit this limit, their internet is throttled to ~1mb/s and blocks all streaming sites for the day.

-As soon as the next day comes around (lets say every midnight) this throttling resets and gives them full access to the speed for another 300mb for the day.

-Ideally I'll also have hours of the day that internet is cut off entirely, so that the capped users cannot use it at all during these hours.

The reason I want to do this is we often have tons of friends and family come by at this camp, and basically nobody has internet here. I don't want to avoid giving internet as I find that a bit insulting, but I don't want people to abuse it either. The reason I'm concerned is there have been cases of friends just standing outside our place just to use our internet. I have thought about doing a hidden network, but as soon as people figure out we have it, we are done lol. Also we have a capped monthly usage for this lte, so we don't want people who aren't us to make us go over the limit.

What could also potentially work is if we have the wifi just automatically kick people off after an hour or 2 of being on the network. That way every time they want wifi they need to get me to enter the password? Perhaps a combination of all of these solutions will work!

Let me know if you have any hardware ideas or ideas on how to make this system work even better! I am open to suggestions!

SupaKomputa · December 28, 2018

What you need is a router that has Quality Of Service feature. Not all consumer router has this enabled.

With QOS you can assign bandwidth cap for each device / ip.

What you want is pretty advance networking, my suggestion is to get a router that is supported by OPENWRT / DDWRT or any custom rom.

Go to https://openwrt.org and ask the forum.

They may have a solution to your problem.

woodepic · December 28, 2018

Just now, SupaKomputa said:

What you need is a router that has Quality Of Service feature. Not all consumer router has this enabled.

With QOS you can assign bandwidth cap for each device / ip.

What you want is pretty advance networking, my suggestion is to get a router that is supported by OPENWRT / DDWRT or any custom rom.

Go to https://openwrt.org and ask the forum.

They may have a solution to your problem.

Okay thanks! In a perfect world this would be somewhat easy to implement but I guess we'll see!