Traffic shaping on unstable slow uplink

[mnirahim]

Good day everyone,

We deployed our Meraki equipment (MXs, MSs, MRs) on sailing vessels, where the internet relies only on satellite connection. Due to the nature of satellite connection, the connection speed varies wildly (from 5Mbps down to 64Kbps) and the latency also varies from the range of 900+ms to 3000ms. 

Below is example of how bad it is:

So, I'm looking for ways to prioritize the traffic. I've been going through the QOS documentation and try to setup QOS rules to prioritizes some of the traffic, but none of it seems to work. Below is the one of example of what we want to achieve:

Basically, we need to ensure all traffic from 10.100.0.0/24, 10.100.1.0/24, 10.100.2.0/24, 10.100.4.0/24, are prioritize over 192.168.100.0 range.

But it seems that it's not working. Contacted Meraki support, but it's not helping much.
So, looking for some wisdom here if traffic shaping is indeed working for slow and unstable link?

[ww]

I dont think there is really a good fix for this with that unstable throughput.

Did you set the mx wan1 speed?

[mnirahim]

Yup, I set the wan1 speed at 500kbps (the average speed they usually got)

[alemabrahao]

Both rules are set to ignore de traffic shaping (unlimited).

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Firewall_and_Traffic_Shaping/Traffic_and_Bandwidth_Shaping

[mnirahim]

Is it possible that we just prioritize the queue instead of applying per-client limit? Since the uplink speed variance is huge, if we put the lower figure, once the speed recovers/becomes higher, they won't be able to enjoy the full speed.

Or my understanding is incorrect?

[alemabrahao]

Traffic Shaping

Administrators can create shaping policies to apply per user controls on a per-application basis. This allows the throttling of recreational applications such as peer-to-peer file-sharing programs and the prioritization of enterprise applications such as Salesforce.com, ensuring that business-critical application performance is not compromised.

Traffic-shaping rules for applications are applied per-flow, so setting a limit of 5Mbps to three different applications will allow 5Mbps down to each application.

Note: Traffic-shaping rules are applied from top-down and therefore these rules will be applied to the flow which matches first. If enabled, default traffic shaping rules will be affixed to the beginning of the available list of rules configured.

[alemabrahao]

But, as @ww said, You should have to resolve the issues that are you having. I noticed that you have a lot of packet loss too.