Building Business With Bandwidth Boosters

Every business is scrutinizing expenditures, looking to maximize the return on every dime. An obvious pitch for telecom sales agents in this environment is telecom expense management, but it’s not the only one. Bandwidth optimization, for example, can optimize use of existing WAN assets, with the cost-conscious impact of staving off additional investments.

There are many techniques that fall under the general umbrella of bandwidth optimization (see Bandwith Optimization Basics). Among those are bandwidth management, load balancing and link bonding — all of which are designed to maximize available capacity and ensure high application and communications performance across the WAN.

Bandwidth Management

Just as TEM is based is based on an initial audit of Just as TEM is based on an initial audit of telecom assets and rates, bandwidth management is based on an audit of bandwidth usage, helping users understand how bandwidth is allocated — or most likely misallocated — across their company.

“Customers are feeling bandwidth-constrained. Most people just throw bandwidth at it. This is a smarter way to attack it,” said Jeremy Kerth, owner and managing partner for telecom agency Wired Networks in Kerrville, Texas. Wired Networks recently began selling the Titan bandwidth management service introduced in August 2008 by TMC Communications Inc. So far, Kerth has sold three customers — each of which was concerned about network congestion. “They wanted to get their arms around what was going on in their networks,” he said.

TMC deploys a Streamcore Inc. appliance at the customer premises to not only monitor the traffic but to control it by applying techniques such as traffic shaping and QoS to prioritize traffic. Titan “smooths out” the traffic flow and “keeps you from adding another circuit,” said Sarah Graham Linares, vice president of revenue assurance and product development at TMC.

For Kerth’s clients Titan was a welcome alternative to adding circuits. “It’s a very small percentage on the total spend of a circuit,” Kerth noted.

Because it’s offered as a managed service, Titan is an operating expense instead of a capital expense, which also can be attractive to customers who are not only bandwidth-constrained, but budget constrained.

Titan costs as low as $75 per location per month for 4MB, but most TMC customers are choosing a higher service level at $175 per location per month, said Graham Linares. She said the service is sold in three levels: The first delivers visibility into the network traffic with weekly reports. The second adds real-time reporting via a Web portal. The third adds traffic control.

Kerth added remediation as another level for his customers. So, when Titan issues alarms for Wired Network’s clients, a third-party vendor responds and works to resolve the issues.