Bandwidth management, a relatively new concept, is gaining increased interest from telcos, thanks to the growing rollouts of VoIP, IPTV (News - Alert), VoD, gaming and other high-speed services.

 

While bandwidth management has been an issue for large corporations and ISPs over years, now it is becoming a problem for home and small business networks as well. Inappropriate use of your network has a negative effect on your business-critical performance. Overuse of network bandwidth on one or two machines causes an adverse impact on other machines.

 

Global telcos’ spending on policy and bandwidth management solutions is expected to grow significantly over the next four years to $700 million, as broadband subscribers place more value on multimedia applications such as IP TV, voice and gaming.

 

Bandwidth management plays a strategic role in the deployment of next generation and IP services, as it helps telcos to guarantee the quality of real-time multimedia services delivered through IP, which changes the dynamics of bandwidth of allocation and management.

 

With bandwidth management, carrierscanensure their network resources are allocated to the right customers using the right services with assured quality. This enables telcos to control the quality of services and increase operational efficiency.

 

For instance, a telco may use about 50% of its network resources and reserve the remaining 50% for peak demand. With the use of bandwidth management solutions, a telco can allocate 60% of network resources and provide services based on different class of services.