Today The Boss IM'd my team: "I'm hearing reports that the Guest Wireless network has suddenly become much slower. What's going on?"
I keep a custom bandwidth gauge pointed at the Guest Internet pipe 7x24, and had seen it maxing out--I was already on it.
NTA quickly identified the top traffic destination was iTunes. It was a short jump from there to knowing that Apple just released iOS 9 yesterday. All our users' iPhones were getting that update, causing the Guest pipe to be filled.
I sent him the graphs, included the trends for the last 30 days and 7 days, showed him the info identifying iTunes as the source. And knew the question coming back would be:
"What can we do about this?"
Again, the answers were easy--but this time unpopular with management:
* Shut down access to iTunes
* Throw up a splash screen and require folks to input credit card numbers to pay maybe $1 per MB (hey, it turns a liability into an asset!).
* Retrain all public users everywhere ("It's not NICE to eat up someone else's bandwidth for your personal use."
* Put in a traffic manager (right now the Guest Internet WLAN is wide open) and limit bandwidth per user or per destination.
* Put in a proxy filter and limit access to off hours
* etc. You get the idea.
How do YOU limit guests / public / employees from consuming all your Guest Internet bandwidth?
