PacketController

Win More Customers with Smarter QoS

For Internet Service Provider, the profits are based on the ISP's bandwidth being purchased at wholesale, and its clients paying retail. So how one ISP stands out by its competitive edge?

Any experienced businessman in this business knows that: high-quality service, low subscription fee and less technical maintenance.

Unfortunately, many ISPs fail to achieve that, you have to invest heavily on backbone to retain the clients, or to pay closer look at if there is oversubscription to business clients because it will hurt you worse than anything else. It is all about balance between the backbone investment and high quality service for clients

The invention of P2P file sharing has been trashing networks, you just can't invest on backbone endlessly; and many clients are on different games, all of them needs the high quality network otherwise you need many manpower to handle customers' complaints.

What does good bandwidth management accomplish

Effective bandwidth management solution is a total system which could help ISP achieves:

  • Provide more client subscriptions without buying more bandwidth
  • Handle seasonal load (for example, heavy in the summer while light in the winter) dynamically
  • Provide quality service without torturing the client
  • Free up manpower

    • What good bandwidth management is NOT

    Good bandwidth management has little to do with constant QoS policy fine tune. You don't have time and resource to look over client bandwidth usage like P2P or games and then change QoS policies based on client traffic pattern. If you do, you are in losing battle.

    Good bandwidth management has little to do with customer complaints; you sell the raw bandwidth to the customers with high efficiency to streamline your daily operation and customer support.

    PacketController implementation in ISP environment

    PacketController implementation is simple and straightforward:

  • Network congestion management at peak time

    • Congestion occurs when the uplink pipe is fully/mostly utilized, the consequence of network congestion is that you have many angry customers complaining that the internet surfing is slow, online game is lagging etc.

    PacketController has built-in congestion control feature which AUTOMATICALLY kicks in when uplink pipe is nearly utilized. Through automatic TCP window manipulation, all the congestions, drops and retransmission have been eliminated.

  • Burst definition based on the uplink bandwidth usage

    • For example, the uplink is 500Mbps, and the burst definition is 400Mbps, the service plan 400Kbps could be bursted to 512Kbps for 3 minutes if the uplink bandwidth usage is less than 400Mbps;

    While uplink usage is more than 400Mbps, the service plan 400Kbps is just using 400Kbps.

    The burst feature is so powerful that you can handle seasonal load dynamically based on the overall bandwidth usage rather than season, which is more accurate; and you can provide higher quality services to the customers when uplink resource is available to do so.

  • Assign different service plans to customers with difference service level

    • For example, you have 8000 customers, they fall into different service levels like 248Kbps, 512Kbps, 2Mb/s, 10Mb/s or whatever.

    Then you could assign different service plans to those 8000 customers by its IP addresses. When it's done, you can forget it and there is definitely no need to look over QoS policies again every time traffic pattern changes.

    You don't need to worry about the system performance and PacketController scales well to 45K QoS policies at multiple gigabit speed.

  • Punishment on "bad-behaved" customers

    • We are not going to pretend that PacketController implementation is the "silver bullet" for "bad-behaved" customers who eat up all the bandwidth assigned to him/her ALL THE TIME.

    ISP services are not supposed to be a punishment of its customers; they are supposed to allow you to provide higher quality services to more people at a lower cost.

    However you don't want people who download all day;

    PacketController provides automatic P2P bandwidth usage throttling technology, it monitors bandwidth usage of each and every online subscriber to identify online 'bad-behaved' subscribers, and there is option of automatic step down of those 'heavy' subscribers in terms of rate limiting or connections.

  • Subscriber Usage Statistics/Feedback

    • To collect the statistics of subscriber bandwidth usage (both real-time and historical) is important, which will help you understand subscriber traffic pattern on your network. The real-time statistics is very powerful tool for you to track down bottleneck on your network. Further, PacketController provides web-based report utility for each and every subscriber to check his/her traffic usage.

  • Web Cache/Billing Integration

    • Web Cache can definitely enhance user response time and thereby user satisfaction. PacketController could seamlessly integrate with External Web Cache System like Squid, it can distinguish between cached and non-cached traffic and manage it transparently. Also PacketController provides database interface for billing system to retrieve bandwidth statistics

    Conclusions

    Internet Service Provider is different from a normal businesses requirement because it directly affects profitability; PacketController proposes net neutral solution in ISP environment: define each and every subscriber with pre-defined tiered service. With powerful burst feature of PacketController, it is easy to accommodate as much customers at the minimum backbone. And this is critical for ISP to remain competitive without the sacrifice of customer's user experience and network performance.