How do I block TV?

Question

With Apple TV, Chromecast, Fire Stick & other bandwidth killers, is there a way to block all of them?  Or, do I need to block them individually?  I've tried, without success, to do this in roles.  Help would be appreciated.   I have a ZD 1200 with T300 APs.  Thanks!

john_d · Answer

The Ruckus controllers don't inherently support blocking devices by OS / device category / content type. My best recommendation here is, if you have observed (via the information from your ZoneDirector) that these types of clients are a problem, you should consider a 3rd party firewall/filtering solution as an intercepting web proxy / gateway. These units have subscription-based curated rules model that can be used to throttle down classes of traffic (e.g. movie streaming) or block them altogether.

(Note that from the CLI there are QoS commands that can be used to tweak/tag/reprioritize traffic going through the AP's, but that won't help if your bottleneck is your WAN connection as opposed to the available WLAN bandwidth)

I'm not sure such devices are the biggest bandwidth hogs, though. Even the most HD streaming offered on those devices peak out at 10mbit or so average, with most streaming content in the 1 to 5 mbit range. Are you actually observing these devices hog your WAN bandwidth? Or are you more experiencing airtime fairness / prioritization issues due to local display mirroring type traffic?