The relatively new concept of bandwidth management is attracting more attention from telcos, due to the expansion of VoIP, VoD, IPTV (News - Alert), gaming and similar high-speed services.

 

Bandwidth management has been an issue for ISPs and large corporations for some time, but it is now also becoming an issue for home and small business networks . Network usage has a direct effect on performance, and thus the overuse of bandwidth on a couple of machines can have a negative impact on other machines.

 

It's anticipated that the spending of global telcos on policy and bandwidth management solutions will grow in the next four years to $700 million. This is mainly because broadband subscribers are putting more value on multimedia applications like IPTV, voice and gaming.

 

The deployment of next generation and IP services depends greatly on bandwidth management, which allows telcos to guarantee the quality of real-time multimedia IP services. This, in turn, alters the dynamics of bandwidth of allocation and management.

 

Carriers are able to ensure via bandwidth management that their network resources are given to the appropriate customers using the right services with an assured level of quality. This gives telcos the ability to increase operational efficiency and control the quality of services.

 

A telco may, for example use half its network resources and reserve the remaining half for peak demand. Through the application of bandwidth management , a telco can allocate 60% of network resources and provide services based on different class of services.