Residential Data Solutions is an expanding company offering a set of services specifically designed for residential end users in northern Alabama, southern Tennessee and northeast Mississippi. They provide a set of services associated with everyday consumer technological needs, including high speed internet access, home computers, wired/wireless networking, home security, home automation and many aspect of audio/video entertainment. We've got about 1000 subscribers, but our circuits have been limited to just 12 megabits. Without the NetEqualizer, we would have been forced to reduce our subscriber count and cut our revenue. But, with the NetEqualizer in place, the automated shaping just kicks in when needed and things are running smoothly without a bandwidth upgrade or subscriber cutback. Steve Potter had been with winbeam for six years. The business was expanding and all was well – until the invention of P2P file sharing. “It would trash our network at different places,” says Steve. Adding NetEqualizer to the system turned things around again. “Before we were having problems when we hit the 300 mark of customers, and it’s essentially let us double that. It’s allowed us to do double the service without buying more bandwidth.” Wood Lake Cable, part of Shaw Communications, provides Cable television, digital cable, high speed cable Internet, web hosting and netcall digital telephone in Winfield, BC, Canada. Feedback from a customer as they were initiating a purchase of their second NetEqualizer.... Foundation Telecommunications is a satellite based telecommunications services company serving broadcast, cable, business, government, and education clients in the U.S. and around the world. Among other customers, they market to a lot of ISPs where T-1s and larger pipes are not available. Lamar Bostic is based in the Rogers, Arkansas office. He manages the network. Bostic says he has experienced the same problems as other ISPs - clogged networks. "Sometimes there's thousands of connections from one PC, bringing the system to a crawl and degrading the service to subscribers." "We tried various software solutions and some other hardware solutions all to varying success and cost," said Bostic. Then he found the NetEqualizer. "I decided to place them at the ISP site instead of the hub. If we control the traffic at the source, or have the ISP control their own traffic, it's more efficient use. That way the disallowed traffic is being kept off that uplink portion, making more bandwidth available," said Bostic. It's worked so well, he's made the NetEqualizer part of his business. "We have made the NetEqualizer a required device for all our new clients. And we're promoting NetEqualizer in all our existing ISP sites." "Operators like them. It takes the pressure off them. There have been absolutely no subscriber complaints. They're certainly perceiving no degradation & probably seeing an improvement. There's nothing to manage on a day-to-day basis, nothing to fiddle with." Hello... I just wanted to let you guys at Netequalizer know how much I depend
on my NE2000. I am a small ISP with about 360 customers and I would be
lost without the Netequalizer. The people there are always very
friendly and quick to respond. Keep up the great work... Thanks! "I work for an ISP serving Michigan's Upper Peninsula (U.P. Logon) that provides wireless, DSL, and cable connections to over 1,000 customers. The NetEqualizer has worked just as advertised and the support team has been awesome when any questions have come up. When we switched over to VLANs on our network, they worked with us at no charge to upgrade their solution in order to support us. I was looking for a one-time investment with long-term benefits and NetEqualizer has been just that." "I bought my first NetEqualizers in 2004 when upgrading from a 2 Mbit to a 10 Mbit line. I'd been using Packeteer, but the NetEqualizer has proven much more affordable and efficient. It's been low maintenance, customizable, and the personal tech support has been great. The lower cost allowed me to put units throughout my expansive network, which is the Westernmost ISP in Canada. The price was what motivated me to test the system and the performance has kept me coming back."
"We've been having problems with encrypted BitTorrent running on Port 80.
uTorrent, Azureus, BitComet clients in particular were impossible to track
down automatically, so finding them by hand and putting them in jail was
starting to take more and more admin time. We had a pretty good connection aging rule set in MikroTik, but lost
bandwidth by having to define a pipe size first, then setting queues within
that defined pipe. Doesn't work particularly well for wireless where the
pipe size tends to change a bit with changing RF conditions during the day.
Also had to put too many rules in too many routers so it was getting pretty
difficult to maintain. I saw a mention or two of NetEqualizer on a couple of forums, and pretty
much brushed it off as more BS. We already had an Etinc bandwidth manager
gathering dust and didn't want the same thing happening again. Well, about two weeks ago we got fed up enough to give NetEqualizer a call.
Had a couple of interesting chats, decent tech sales conversations, very
little push from them, careful to set reasonable expectations etc. They said
it works, its completely transparent, holds traffic levels within 10-15% of
what you want, prioritizes interactive stuff including VoIP and requires
very little setup and even less maintenance. It manages traffic patterns
only and doesn't try to sniff packets to detect PtP. They were also very clear that "less is more". Don't put in a bunch of rules
to micro manage, just let it do its thang. So we bought one last Friday. The 45Mbit version, cost about $3500 or so
including some basic support and maintenance. Nice 1U case, but quite a
noisy fan. Showed up Tuesday morning, which is pretty good shipping time
considering it went through customs to get here. Plugged it in around lunchtime Tuesday into a managed switch where we could
easily cut it in and out of our main feed trunk. Left if out of the traffic
stream while we read through the quickstart guide, then took about 5 mins to
give it an IP address and put in the basic three rules. Made a few entries
to exempt various servers from connection limits, gave three or four
customer IPs "priority host" exemptions and left it alone for a while to
make sure that the magic smoke wasn't going to suddenly escape. Flipped switch ports to put the NetEq into the traffic stream about 5pm
Tuesday. Still had a bunch of MT routers running rule sets, including the
main gateway with a global daytime PtP ban. WELL! It settled in very gracefully within a few minutes, and we could see
the connection count to the Internet gradually dropping off, while bandwidth
utilization started to smooth out to about 2 Mbit less than the 21 Mbit we
had set. You could watch IP pair delay "penalties" being applied, increased,
decreased and removed in the log. Bursts were still allowed to bring the
peak just over 22 Mbit, and the upload side settled at about 1 Mbit less
than the 6 Mbits we set. Again, bursts were allowed to around 7 Mbits. The
Internet felt great!! Over the next few hours we disable all the existing MT rule sets, including
the global gateway rules for PtP. Bandwidth utilization still looked
relatively smooth, cruising around the Net felt great, VoIP worked fine,
everything was peachy. The next day we figured out that a couple of big customers running over VPN
tunnels needed priority exemptions, as tunnels look like one big lump of
abuse from a NetEqualizer viewpoint. We also set some priorities with bandwidth caps for big clients running server farms. And waited for the shoe to drop.... And waited, and waited. Calls to our
tech support dropped off, nobody was complaining about throughput, and we
waited some more. Even PtP worked great during the day as it was allowed to
use any unused bandwidth that "real-time" applications didn't need. And we're still waiting four days later. This device is about the closest thing to black magic we've seen in years.
It just plain works. I've removed about half of the few config rules I put
in to start, we simply don't need them. The only thing you have to watch is
connection limits on servers, and make exemptions for big customers routing
all their traffic through tunnels. That's it. To put this in context, we're handling just under 30 Mbits total flow, and
sit at about 2400 pps each way during the day, dropping off out of business
hours. We have an evening residential burst to about 70% of our daytime max.
We're seeing about 1300 concurrent IP connection pairs during the day down
to around 800 in the evening. That's with roughly 750 customers representing
5000+ total seats. 900 MHz customers normally get 3 Mbit or so, and pretty
much everyone else gets 5+, so they get grumpy fast if bandwidth drops off. It only took 10-15 customers running encrypted PtP on Port 80 to ruin our
lives, and the trend they represented was horrifying. Over the last six
months, our bandwidth utilization has gone up at least 50% higher than can
be accounted for by customer growth. Obviously we have no connection with NetEqualizer beyond being a very happy customer.
Their FAQ here http://www.netequalizer.com/tsfaq.htm pretty much says it
all."
Sigmund Shapiro, Residential Data Solutions
In early 2009 Sigmund Shapiro was looking for a bandwidth control solution and decided upon the NetEqualizer. Since then, he has been very happy with its performance controlling congestion on his network. According to Sigmund, this is the "best investment I've ever made".
George Abernathy, Internet Free Planet
The best part is that NetEqualizer has freed up manpower, thus allowing us to grow out (our) business. In this latest release, we've noticed that speed and efficiency are even better than before. I'm also a fan of the interface. Its basic, but simple to use. To top it off, NTOP, the reporting tool, is now on
a separate disk partition, which just shows that these guys are on the ball, constantly making improvements and doing everything they can to make the NetEqualizer a solid reliable tool.
Steve Potter, winbeam
Darren Mullion, IT Director, Shaw - Wood Lake Cable
There were three technical challenges for Wood Lake Cable. File sharing, was “killing” them and caused a ton of customer support issues. “People just don't realize what file sharing does to their Internet service,” said Darren Mulloin, IT Director. Secondly, they needed a way to ensure VoIP traffic was given priority over all other traffic. Lastly, they have many very high speed customers, (5 to 10 Megs), and they wanted them to be fast, but they didn't want them to dominate their network during peak hours.
“We looked at several products of this type, most were well over 20K and very complicated. NetEqualizer was affordable, easy to setup/manage, and has delivered excellent results. Pay back was only a few months.”
The other companies they looked at offered all the functionality of the NetEqualizer, “but you needed a full time techno guru to run them, and some of them wanted service contracts so they could do all the support. It just didn't make sense for us.”
“It was very easy to set up. The default settings were very close to what we have now and once configured, it has been running flawlessly. I was expecting this type of gear to be a pain to look after, but we haven't had to touch it in months, it just runs and does the job,” said Mulloin.
“It is doing exactly what we hoped it would do, reduced our upstream bandwidth and allowed us to manage the downstream bandwidth hogs.”
Darren Mulloin concludes: “We would absolutely recommend NetEqualizer to others in the field. We love it.”
Telecommunications Industry Provider
"We currently have one of your NE2000-45 NetEq boxes on a saturated 45Mbps link which provides bandwidth for approximately 1000 cable internet subscribers. We couldn't be happier with it. It has cut down on our complaints of slow internet speeds dramatically."
Lamar Bostic, Network Manager, Foundation Telecommunications, Inc.
Dave Barker, Broadlinc Communications
Chris Gotstein, U.P. Logon
Jim Pazarena, qcislands.net (haidagwaii.net)
George Morris, GorillaNET.ca