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I'm setting up access points (TL-WA901ND) that can each support up to four SSIDs, which can be assigned to VLANs. I would like to set up three SSIDs, each on a different VLAN, with the following behavior:

  • The ADMIN SSID (say VLAN 1) gets unlimited bandwidth with unlimited access and high priority.
  • The STAFF SSID (say VLAN 2) gets limited bandwidth with limited hours per day and medium priority.
  • The STUDENT SSID (say VLAN 3) gets limited bandwidth with limited hours per day & low priority, with different limits than those for staff.

Routers and switches seem to be able to control bandwidth and access times based on everything but VLAN. Thanks for insight!

BTW I've read other questions addressing this topic, but the environments were much larger and the solutions had components we probably can't afford. We're only about 50 users total, so not really an enterprise per se but the question also seems a bit over the head of SuperUser forum & so I'm here.

Gracious thanks.

Eric Nelson
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1 Answers1

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Many routers can provide the types of quality-of-service functions you're asking about for different VLANs. To routers, different VLANs typically appear as virtual interfaces, and you can often apply different routing policies based on ingress / egress interfaces.

Don't get too hung-up on the VLAN part of this. If worse comes to worse, you could use a router device with multiple physical interfaces each dedicated to servicing a given VLAN. (Any modern router, though, is going to handle VLAN subinterfaces on a single physical interface just fine.)

A Linux machine running iptables and the tc traffic control tools could do what you want. There are very likely firewall-oriented distributions out there that could handle your needs. Likewise, the FreeBSD "pfSense" distribution will handle it, too.

Finally, there are a large number of commercial offerings that can handle your needs. The lower-end Dell SonicWall devices, for example, can do what you're looking for.

Evan Anderson
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  • I had a suspicion there was some iptables magic that could do this. Would dd-wrt or openwrt be a good choice? PS this is going into an orphanage in southern Belize... leaving tomorrow. – Eric Nelson Oct 14 '14 at 23:51