Pipeline Publishing, Volume 6, Issue 7

	This Month's Issue:
	Bandwidth Management

The Enormous Appetite for Data

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equests for higher Class of Service for individual applications, which could be billed at premium rates.

How long is a piece of string?

But as with any resource limited traffic management schemes, knowledge of the available capacity and trends is essential to avoid disaster. Historic information must be compiled from as-built, used and demand traffic levels, then compared with predicted future market growth. Trend planning at this network wide level allows an accurate picture to be created from which both future marketing plans (how much is available to sell) and operational investment plans (how much do I need to build) can be derived.

Scenarios

Some vendors propose solutions which ask the customer to select the performance and bandwidth required on a per usage basis. Or to use a menu option to speed up the service in areas of poor quality.

Most users, however, like to keep things simple. One method to achieve this would be to increase the rate of consumption within the monthly useage allowance. For example, 1GB of high priority might consume 2GB of your monthly allowance. 1GB of video streaming priority might take up 3GB or more. In this way, consumers could relate to a single base tariff for data, and understand the proportional cost of additional data.

Understanding the total capacity available

Available bandwidth for any individual cell or DSLAM is always going to be determined in real-time based on the committed traffic demand placed on it at any point in time.

Operators will need to invest in real-time network elements to prioritize and manage their bandwidth to each user.

Capacity cannot therefore be guaranteed for any individual user at any individual location. But service providers can manage their networks more proactively through these two techniques and establish premium data services at a premium price.

So what needs to be done?

Operators will need to invest in real-time network elements to prioritise and manage their bandwidth to each user.

An equally important investment will be in OSS systems which provide an accurate and comprehensive view of the total capacity available today and in the future. These systems will be used not only to design and plan capacity upgrades, but to work with marketing departments to assess and develop viable data packages and tariff structures.

With these tools in place, operators can balance the need to meet customer expectations with that of maximising the revenue from their existing data network capacity.

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