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Managing Network Bandwidth
Hoax or Need?
Evaluating the usefulness of managing network bandwidth
By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your
feedback
is important to us!)
Created: December 6,
2001
| Published by: |
NetSuds
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January 2002 |
Visiting this year's Western Cable Show there were many
booths/vendors housed under the subject of "Bandwidth Management". I suppose
bandwidth management has become this year's solution to the problems experienced by many
broadband operators. However, I still don't get it.
Broadband operators find themselves in this position where the
services they are offering over their CATV, DSL, Wireless, or Satellite delivery media are
beginning to consume increasing amounts of their available bandwidth. The
"solution" being proposed to operators is that if they use bandwidth management
software they can determine where the traffic is coming from, what kind of traffic it is,
and how best to manage it. I guess, so that they can free up some of this bandwidth being
consumed and prolong their investment in network hardware. Only how exactly can you manage
traffic, really? Note that bandwidth management software is nothing but an observer and
cannot actively do anything to the network to fix (or treat) any problems it may find
– repairing the network still requires a network engineer.
I've always believed that there is no such thing as bandwidth
management -- it doesn't exist! Bandwidth is consumed by content and without content you
would not have any need for bandwidth -- much less the need to manage it. Therefore if you
were able to manage content (either at the source or the destination), there would not be
any need to manage bandwidth -- the network would just do as it is supposed to do which is
take care of it self. Networks do this very well in fact.
Of course managing content is not going to buy you endless freedom
from bandwidth woes, this is where careful planning comes into play. Besides the need to
manage content, broadband operators also need to manage how they size their services that
run over their networks. For example, many broadband operators literally give bandwidth
away with little regard to the consequences this will have on their network over the
course of time. When the service becomes impaired (slow) operators look to software such
as bandwidth management (which represents an additional investment) to determine who their
top talkers (bandwidth users) are or even seek to divide up their networks into smaller
subsets (yet another investment) to sustain some previously established standard for
service speed and quality. What was the logic/market data used to determine these initial
service speed and quality settings anyway?
I would argue that charting top talkers is a waste of time! Why,
because these subscribers are not doing anything wrong (the service can already restrict
most wrongful things from being possible), they are merely using the service that they
have paid for -- they aren't trying to take advantage of the operator. I equate this to
pre-paying for fuel at the gas station. When you pre-pay, you’re allotted some amount
of fuel equivalent to that which you paid. Thing is, if you need the entire amount you
paid for you (as a consumer) are not wrong to use what you rightfully paid for. In this
example, it’s as if broadband operators are expecting people who subscribed (prepaid)
for service to not consume their entitled bandwidth (fuel) -- leave it for the next guy. I
wish someone would leave me some free fuel at my next stop at the gas pump...
Some day, a smart person is going to figure out what a data service
is really worth and those operators who have arbitrarily offered data services to their
subscribers in the past without this information are going to look back and wonder how
much money they could have made if only they would have charged what the thing was worth
or only provide the level of service that the subscriber was willing to pay. As for
managing bandwidth, it will remain a pipe dream as no software really controls what
happens between two points on a network (hardware vendors control this space
transparently).
Content will be the only thing that can be managed but its control is
only possible at the edge of the network (source or destination). The destination appears
to be the first logical place to start as it is closest to the consumer as well as one of
the bottlenecks of the system (the last mile -- the other bottlenecks being the Internet
and the content source). One can either throttle this endpoint to prohibit individual
users from consuming too much bandwidth (goes back to my point about designing services
that the operator's technology can sustain and will permit linear growth in bandwidth
demand) or they can better manage the content they already have (there are several
applications out there today that for example make browsing more efficient by working more
like a proxy). The source of the content can also be managed but this often requires
engineering, as the goal here is to optimize distribution of content. Very few content
services actually do this, thus they create a new problems downstream for others to solve.
One example of managing content at the source would be to only send unique content or only
the changes (deltas). Teleconferencing software has done a terrific job at doing this kind
of thing however few other applications have taken this approach – ASPs could greatly
benefit from this innovation.
As a result you have companies trying to make up for lack of
sophistication and optimization in content delivery and consumption by trying the tweak
the network it traverses. Making changes to the network will never fix this problem, it
only further delays the inevitable (using up all available bandwidth) or extends the
period of time where bandwidth is unavailable. Again, if you don't regulate demand or the
distribution of content you cannot fix this problem between the endpoints (by managing the
network) -- that is the pipe dream. The network is merely the scapegoat, taking the blame
for years of content's lack of innovation and optimization in its delivery methods.
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