We have a customer on a site with an LTE cell link as their WAN connection. The cell provider sells the link as 25Mbps down by 10Mbps up. The customer needs traffic shaping on site, where some of their LAN devices have high priority, some medium priority, and other devices are low priority. If it matters, all these devices are on the same subnet.
The problem is that the 25Mbps by 10Mbps is not guaranteed. If another customer on the same cell tower happens to be downloading something, our customer won't be able to get their full 25Mbps/10Mbps. Not even close. That means that one second, the WAN link might be capable of the full 25Mbps/10Mbps, and a few seconds later, it will only be able to handle 3Mbps by 400Kbps.
This link varies widely every second, depending on who is using the cell tower, and there's no way to know what your maximum current bandwidth is any given second. Even a speed test is absolutely useless the second it completes, as the number of devices using the cell tower may change any second.
My question is this: are there any traffic shaping algorithms or strategies out there that can account for a WAN link with a highly unstable bandwidth? Is this common?
We're looking for some device to put on the customer's site that can do the traffic shaping, while being smart enough to handle variable WAN link bandwidth. We're not really sure what we should even be looking for. Perhaps a device that supports a particular QoS algorithm.
