Why are we doing this?
In the last few years, bulk bandwidth prices have plummeted. The fundamentals for managing bandwidth have also changed. Many of our smaller customers, businesses with 50 to 300 employees, are upgrading their old 10 megabit circuits with 50 Megabit links at no extra cost. There seems to be some sort of bandwidth fire sale going on…
Is there a catch?
The only restriction on the Lite unit (when compared to the NE2000) is the number of users it can handle at one time. It is designed for smaller networks. It has all the features and support of the higher-end NE2000. For those familiar with our full-featured product, you do not lose anything.
Here are ten things you can still do with our $999 Bandwidth Controller
1) Provide priority for VOIP and Skype on an MPLS link.
2) Full use of Bandwidth Pools. This is our bandwidth restriction by subnet feature and can be used to ease congestion on remote Access Points.
3) Implement bandwidth restrictions by quota.
4) Have full graphical reporting via NTOP reporting integration.
5) Automated priority via equalizing for low-bandwidth activities such as web browsing, using Citrix terminal emulation, and web applications (database queries).
6) Priority for selected video stations.
7) Basic Rate limits by IP, or MAC address.
8) Limit P2P traffic.
9) Automatically email customers on bandwidth overages.
10) Sleep well at night knowing your network will run smoothly during peak usage.
Are Bandwidth Controllers still relevant?
Dirt cheap bandwidth upgrades are good for consumers, but not for expensive bandwidth controllers on the market. For some products in excess of $50,000, this might be the beginning of the end. We are fortunate to have built a lean company with low overhead. We rely mostly on a manufacturer-direct market channel, and this is greatly reduces our cost of sale. From experience, we know that even with higher bandwidth amounts, letting your customers run wide-open is still going to lead to trouble in the form of congested links and brownouts.
As bandwidth costs drop, the Bandwidth Controller component of your network is not going to go away, but it must also make sense in terms of cost and ease of use. The next generation bandwidth controller must be full-featured while also competing with lower bandwidth prices. With our new low-end models, we will continue to make the purchase of our equipment a “no brainer” in value offered for your dollar spent.
There is nothing like our Lite Unit on the market delivered with support and this feature set at this price point. Read more about the features and specifications of our NetEqualizer Lite in our NetEqualizer Lite Data Sheet.
NetEqualizer News Blog 
What Does it Cost You Per Mbs for Bandwidth Shaping?
February 14, 2012 — netequalizerSometimes by using a cost metric you can distill a relatively complicated thing down to a simple number for comparison. For example, we can compare housing costs by Dollars Per Square Foot or the fuel efficiency of cars by using the Miles Per Gallon (MPG) metric. There are a number of factors that go into buying a house, or a car, and a compelling cost metric like those above may be one factor. Nevertheless, if you decide to buy something that is more expensive to operate than a less expensive alternative, you are probably aware of the cost differences and justify those with some good reasons.
Clearly this makes sense for bandwidth shaping now more than ever, because the cost of bandwidth continues to decline and as the cost of bandwidth declines, the cost of shaping the bandwidth should decline as well. After all, it wouldn’t be logical to spend a lot of money to manage a resource that’s declining in value.
With that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to looking at bandwidth shaping on a cost per Mbs basis. Alternatively, I could look at bandwidth shaping on a cost per user basis, but that metric fails to capture the declining cost of a Mbs of bandwidth. So, cost per Mbs it is.
As we’ve pointed out before in previous articles, there are two kinds of costs that are typically associated with bandwidth shapers:
1) Upfront costs (these are for the equipment and setup)
2) Ongoing costs (these are for annual renewals, upgrades, license updates, labor for maintenance, etc…)
Upfront, or equipment costs, are usually pretty easy to get. You just call the vendor and ask for the price of their product (maybe not so easy in some cases). In the case of the NetEqualizer, you don’t even have to do that – we publish our prices here.
With the NetEqualizer, setup time is normally less than an hour and is thus negligible, so we’ll just divide the unit price by the throughput level, and here’s the result:
I think this is what you would expect to see.
For ongoing costs you would need to add all the mandatory per year costs and divide by throughput, and the metric would be an ongoing “yearly” per Mbs cost.
Again, if we take the NetEqualizer as an example, the ongoing costs are almost zero. This is because it’s a turn-key appliance and it requires no time from the customer for bandwidth analysis, nor does it require any policy setup/maintenance to effectively run (it doesn’t use policies). In fact, it’s a true zero maintenance product and that yields zero labor costs. Besides no labor, there’s no updates or licenses required (an optional service contract is available if you want ongoing access to technical support, or software upgrades).
Frankly, it’s not worth the effort of graphing this one. The ongoing cost of a NetEqualizer Support Agreement ranges from $29 (dollars) – $.20 (cents) per Mbs per year. Yet, this isn’t the case for many other products and this number should be evaluated carefully. In fact, in some cases the ongoing costs of some products exceed the upfront cost of a new NetEqualizer!
Again, it may not be the case that the lowest cost per Mbs of bandwidth shaping is the best solution for you – but, if it’s not, you should have some good reasons.
If you shape bandwidth now, what is your cost per Mbs of bandwidth shaping? We’d be interested to know.
If your ongoing costs are higher than the upfront costs of a new NetEqualizer and you’re open to a discussion, you should drop us a note at sales@apconnections.net.
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