This month’s issue of the APconnections’ newsletter, “Get Connected,” includes information on our recently announced product lineup, which includes the addition of support for priority voice and video to the entire NetEqualizer product family. Other additions include new models, ranging from 2Mbps up to 155 Mbps. This month’s technical feature discusses methodologies for managing bandwidth and proposes that detailed management of bandwidth that requires expensive analysis tools and human intervention is quickly becoming outmoded.

Product Update

On Monday, November 15, 2004 we announced that we’ve added support for priority voice and video to the entire NetEqualizer product line. In addition, we announced that we’ve added several models to the product family and support bandwidth ranging from 2Mbps up to 155 Mbps.

Now, businesses ranging from Internet cafes and corporations to service providers and telcos will be able to take advantage of NetEqualizer's built-in traffic shaping controls to cost-effectively and automatically provide priority for voice and video traffic and relieve congestion for data traffic with one easy-to-install and manage appliance.

Here’s what a couple of NetEqualizer customers had to say about the announcement:

“NetEqualizer has helped us to successfully rollout our new VoIP project, allowing us to increase our service offerings to our customer base,” said Jaimie Locke, network administrator, Catapulsion Broadband. “We attempted to work with another vendor's products, but faced significant difficulties in both installation and management. We turned to APconnections for a solution. Once we plugged in NetEqualizer, our problems were solved. Installation was seamless and bandwidth allocation between voice and data traffic is automatic. And, best of all, our customers get clear voice services.

"We use NetEqualizer to balance the competing data traffic needs of our student population," said Andrew Bynum, IS manager, Housing Northwest, Inc., and instructor at Portland State University . "With heavy downloads, video files, chat and email, the traffic on our network presents a challenge when considering QoS. With the addition of priority for VoIP and video streaming, APconnections has given us a cost-effective solution that works out of the box for all of our traffic."

Technical Article

Letting go of Details that Don’t Matter

With flat, low-cost long distance calling plans, most CIOs would find it difficult to justify the cost of a high-end analysis tool to provide a detailed report about their phone traffic. Yes, perhaps a very few organizations with extremely large toll charges could cost-justify a tool that might help, but for most other organizations, the brain power and time required for this cost reduction would better be spent in other areas that truly affect the bottom line.

With the advent of automated bandwidth management tools, and the falling price point of raw bandwidth, the practice of analyzing and managing the nitty details of bandwidth is also becoming a dinosaur proposition. However, many organizations still spend a tremendous amount of time and resources, both in terms of staff and tools, looking at the specific usage patterns of all the applications on the network in order to make “optimizations.”

While there are a few exceptions, experience shows that for companies that choose instead to use an automated tool, network traffic does not suffer and the resources dedicated to analysis and tweaking of the network can be better applied elsewhere. Behavior based fairness rules alleviate bandwidth congestion thus reducing cost without expensive teams of experts.

While it is true that a high priority user (your CEO, for example) or an important application such as Citrix with significant bandwidth needs, may get throttled during peak times using the generic approach, the good news is that IT need not conduct a month of analysis to identify such exceptions. Most IT organizations are aware of who their priority users are and the application types running over their networks and are able to quickly and easily set priority exception rules for users and applications that require special treatment.

The last important aspect of the “new” model for bandwidth control is decentralization of control. Putting low and medium cost control units out near the edges is more practical than a massive central piece of iron. If network usage is slow between the main office and Chicago , then just buy one low-cost unit for this link. With units based on fairness control starting at about 1/6 the cost of the higher end-analysis tools, you can control bandwidth on links as needed.

In summary there are 3 basic parts to the new philosophy

• Let the bandwidth controller use fairness to get abuse under control. This approach does not require any manpower—just plug it in
• Use a small number of exception rules for priority users—you know who they are, so don’t need to do analysis
• Decentralize using lower cost bandwidth control units on links where needed