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.
Bandwidth Shaping Shake Up, Your Packet Shaper May be Obsolete?
July 25, 2016 — netequalizerIf you went to sleep in 2005 and woke up 10 years later you would likely be surprised by some dramatic changes in technology.
What happened to layer 7 and Packet Shaping?
In the early 2000’s all the rave in traffic classification was the ability to put different types of bandwidth traffic into labeled buckets and assign a priority to them. Akin to rating your food choices on a tapas menu ,network administrators enjoyed an extensive list of various traffic. Youtube, Citrix, news feeds, the list was only limited by the price and quality of the bandwidth shaper. The more expensive the traffic shaper , the more choices you had.
Starting in 2005 and continuing to this day, several forces started to work against the layer 7 paradigm.
So where does this leave the bandwidth shaping market?
There is still some demand for layer 7 type shapers, particular in countries like China, where they attempt to control everything. However in Europe and in the US , the trend is to more basic controls that do not violate the FCC rule, cost less, and use some form intelligent based fairness rules such as:
Will Shaping be around in 10 years?
Yes, consumers and businesses will always find ways to use all their bandwidth and more.
Will price points for bandwidth continue to drop ?
I am going to go against the grain here, and say bandwidth prices will flatten out in the near future. Prices over the last decade slid for several reasons which are no longer in play.
The biggest driver in price drops was the wide acceptance of wave division muliplexing on carrier lines in the 2005- present time frame. There was already a good bit of fiber in the ground but the WDM innovation caused a huge jump in capacity, with very little additional cost to providers.
The other factor was a major world-wide recession, where businesses where demand was slack.
Lastly there are no new large carriers coming on line. Competition and price wars will ease up as suppliers try to increase profits.
Share this:
Like this: