Troubleshooting WAN Saturation

Procedure

  1. Determine the subscriber's contracted rate. For this example, we'll assume that the subscriber has a 10 megabits per second (sustained) download rate as capped by the Service Provider network.
  2. Click on the subscriber in the Subscribers tab to bring up the Summary screen.
  3. Look at the Bandwidth Use chart and see if recent activity has been near the contracted rate (note that this display only shows download consumption). In the example picture below, the subscriber was recently consuming nearly 10Mbps of bandwidth.

Bandwidth Use - Downstream example

  1. To get more details on this, click on the Bandwidth tab and see which devices are consuming the bandwidth. In the example below, one device (pink) generally tends to consume more bandwidth. A short while ago, two devices were collectively nearing the contracted rate (orange and pink). In such a case, multiple devices are possibly competing for maximum bandwidth (such as multiple video streams to different devices). By pausing the bandwidth consumption of all but one device, true performance of the Internet connection can be confirmed.

Bandwidth Use Panel

  1. In the same screen, click on the Upstream mode. If a subscriber is hosting data (webcams, file servers, etc.), and the upstream bandwidth is at the cap, then download performance may also be affected.

What to Do Next

For this scenario, the problem can be solved by the subscriber upgrading their contracted rate or limiting consumption by other devices.