Is there a way to raise contention ratios without creating network congestion, thus allowing your network to service more users?
Yes there is.
First a little background on the terminology.
Congestion occurs when a shared network attempts to deliver more bandwidth to its users than is available. We typically think of an oversold/contended network with respect to ISPs and residential customers; but this condition also occurs within businesses, schools and any organization where more users are vying for bandwidth than is available.
The term, contention ratio, is used in the industry as a way of determining just how oversold your network is. A contention ratio is simply the size of an Internet trunk divided by the number of users. We normally think of Internet trunks in units of megabits. For example, 10 users sharing a one megabit trunk would have a 10-to- 1 contention ratio.
A decade ago, a 10-to-1 contention ratio was common. Today, bandwidth is much less expensive and the average contention ratios have come down. Unfortunately, as bandwidth costs have dropped, pressure on trunks has risen, as today’s applications require increasing amounts of bandwidth. The most common congestion symptom is slow network response times.
Now back to our original question…
Is there a way to raise contention ratios without creating congestion, thus allowing your network to service more users?
This is where a smart bandwidth controller can help. Back in the “old” days before encryption was king, most solutions involved classifying types of traffic, and restricting less important traffic based on customer preferences. Classifying by type went away with encryption, which prevents traffic classifiers from seeing the specifics of what is traversing a network. A modern bandwidth controller uses dynamic rules to restrict traffic based on aberrant behavior. Although this might seem less intuitive than specifically restricting traffic by type, it turns out to be just as reliable, not to mention simpler and more cost-effective to implement.
We have seen results where a customer can increase their user base by as much as 50 percent and still have decent response times for interactive cloud applications.
To learn more, contact us, our engineering team is more than happy to go over your specific situation, to see if we can help you.
You also might be interested in this VPN product https://www.cloudwards.net/safervpn-review/
NetEqualizer News Blog 
Leave a Reply