restricting bandwidth to 100mb on gigabit interface

[reidg]

we are investigating an evolved ethernet solution from a service provide, one scenarion involves the presentation of a 1 gig link to us, however they will restrict to 100mb from their side. At our side we will want to shape traffic to conform to the 100mb limit.

The link will have data, and some voice (not a lot) voice traffic.

Should I just use a Policy-Map with class-default and police to 100mb, or shape with a shape average?

or should I go deeper and look to add various class-maps to identify different traffic flows, i.e. voice bearer, voice control, data, etc and then shape or police.

Thanks

[tdrais]

If you police it you may be able to just do that as you describe. With Voip users will hear jitter more than packet lose unless you drop a lot of packets.

If you use anytype of shaping you will create queues and you will then need to configure priority queing for your voice to avoid jitter.

In the long run you are going to want to classify your traffic. Even with data only there is always traffic someone thinks is more important and should not be dropped.

[reidg]

thanx, so you think that classifying is required?

normally I havn't bothered with queuing traffic and classifying on links at 100 or 1gig, and havn't had any problems with voip.

as i need to reduce a physical gig link to 100mb, I'll have to implement something to do that, and thats why I wondered about just shaping or policing to 100mb by just using a default class, and not bothering about classifying as we've never had issues at this bandwidth.

opinions welcome.

[tdrais]

Just go ahead and police it and see what happens. If your see very little traffic dropped by the policer then you have no issues. If you see a lot of traffic dropped then you need to start thinking about classification. You really can't do the classification into what is good and bad traffic until your users complain. Someone will then need to decide who is more important any you can implement it.