This is an old revision of the document!

Fair Usage Policy (FUP)

Introduction

From January 2023 RADIUSdesk now also includes a powerful FUP package.
We worked with our clients to come up with a innovative and flexible implementation that packs a punch.
This document will start with a high level discussion about the various FUP requirements met with this implementation.
It will then go on to do a hands-on FUP profile.
Finally we will show you where to tweak things should the need arise for your specific environment or implementation.

In South Africa some of the big ISPs implement multiple layers of service for their FUP.
- There will be a reduction in bandwidth when a certain amount of data is used during the month.
- There will be a further reduction in bandwidth when a second milestone of data used is reached.
- Finally when a third milestone is reached the bandwidth is throttled down to a trickle.
- When the new month starts everything is reset back to normal speed again.
Another requirement is the ability to assign an IP Pool to a certain level of service.
- This is typically with ISPs that use Mikrotik PPPoE servers.
- There will for instance be a premium IP Pool and a best effort IP Pool.
- A user will start off on the premium IP Pool up to the point where their specified FUP is triggered.
- Thereafter they are moved to the best effort IP Pool.
Communities that uses RADIUSdesk wanted to offer their users more bandwidth between midnight and 7AM since the utilization on the up-link are very low during that time and it can then encourage a more distributed usage graph.
With these various requirements in mind we formulated the FUP package in RADIUSdesk.

There are two sections for a FUP based profile.
- The first section specifies the basic speed when no limits are imposed.
- The second section contains a list of restriction FUP components to apply.

In the screenshot above we see two stage throttling.
When the user's total usage reached 100Gb we will half its bandwidth. (reduce to 50Mb/s)
Then when the user reaches a usage of 200Gb we will reduce its bandwidth further. (reduce to 25Mb/s)
The FUP component is composed of the following items.
- Descriptive name.
- If condition. Options include Time of day, Daily usage, Weekly usage, Monthly usage.
- For Time of day there will be a start time and end time.
- For data usage there will be an amount of data.
- Action. When the trigger has been reached we can block the traffic, decrease the speed or increase the speed.
- An optional IP Pool that should be used if the component is triggered.
You can combine various type of FUP components together.
- The logic that applies them will use the following rules.
  - Blocking traffic will take preference.
  - Components that decrease the speed will use the slowest (biggest decrease percentage)
  - Components that increase the speed will use the slowest (smallest increase percentage)
- This essentially means the strictest component's action will be applied.

For FUP to work correct there are two important items which has to be in place and work.

To determine the exact start of day, week or month the timezone that a RADIUS Client is deployed in needs to be specified.
If this is not set it will fall back to the timezone that the RADIUSdesk installation is set to.

In order for the system to detect and activate an FUP restriction it needs to disconnect an active session of a user.
The RADIUS Client should then re-authenticate the client where the restriction will be applied. (This is standard procedure for PPPoE connections)