Sponsored by Allot Communications
Today’s telecom service providers are under increasing pressure to find ways to boost revenue, improve customer loyalty and deploy new services. The once reliable revenue stream provided by the high value (and high cost) of a voice phone call is rapidly disappearing, thanks to emerging alternative voice channels like mobile phones and VoIP. Further heightening the need to maximize existing assets and find new revenue sources is the large capital investment many providers have in their networks – an investment that is rapidly depreciating.
Compounding the profitability challenge for service providers is the emerging world of mass-market peer-to-peer (P2P) networking and file sharing. P2P networking goes to the heart of the original Internet concept: the ability to transform computers into peers that act as both client and server for unrestricted intercommunications without any central control. However, add the rapid growth of broadband IP access and the result is massive bandwidth consumption that is threatening to choke the Internet on an uncontrolled diet of P2P traffic.
While P2P networking offers a highly efficient and resilient method to distribute content over IP, the problem is its eventual cost to providers as new capacity fills up and service quality falters. The sticking point for many providers is that they have no way of determining how much P2P traffic they actually have. That’s because many existing network architectures simply aren’t designed to effectively manage P2P traffic patterns or even to distinguish them.
Intelligence, Visibility and Control
As providers move away from single, best-effort service to providing multiple services that have bandwidth and quality demands, service management is becoming a key business process. Service management historically has focused on the mechanics of physical network provisioning; however, with the growing popularity of triple-play services and file sharing, service management has to become much broader. In other words, networks aren’t just about speeds, feeds and bandwidth capacity; they are about providing crucial visibility of network usage and user behavior.
The key is making the network more intelligent and application-aware for increased application control and greater optimization. Network intelligence is about controlling traffic and maximizing average revenue per user. But it’s also about making more efficient use of network assets and delivering tiered services to increase revenue.
Improving profitability also requires controlling costs while consistently meeting service-level commitments and outshining the competition on customer service. Therefore, to achieve commercial success, service providers must manage P2P traffic in a way to prevent untamed traffic volumes from overwhelming their network and hindering service levels. This is where traffic management systems come into play, providing the tools needed to identify, classify and control P2P traffic and eventually transform this capability into new revenue-generating services.
Controlling network traffic requires limiting bandwidth to certain applications, guaranteeing minimum bandwidth to others, and marking traffic with high or low priorities. While prioritizing traffic as a set of higher-level protocols isn’t a new concept, the difficulty has always been on implementation, along with the actual management of the traffic, including the inevitable breakdowns. However, using advanced deep packet inspection technology, today’s network traffic systems provide the necessary in-depth insight and analysis to understand networks and directly link between business goals and network traffic and behavior.
Capable of accurately identifying hundreds of applications, these systems enable detection of heavy users, monitor network status, evaluate trends and track network behavior down to a single connection to help fine-tune network performance. With inherent automated policy-enforcement capability, this technology enables providers to set policies that separately monitor and control subscriber activities, control P2P applications and leverage their popularity by prioritization.
For example, NetEnforcer, a traffic management solution from Allot Communications, manages network traffic by importance prioritization, enabling the matching of customer expectations and application requirements with policies that intelligently and efficiently manage available resources. This results in the delivery of fair and equitable service levels among subscribers, ensuring that all users receive high-quality Web sessions without being overwhelmed by high-bandwidth subscribers. Moreover, the system quickly identifies, isolates and mitigates many types of security threats and malicious traffic, thereby reducing costs and downtime.
Analysis of information in real time and over time allows for effective long-term reporting, capacity planning, usage tracking and service package optimization. This capability also allows providers to alleviate some network congestion problems and apply some “proportional enforcement” to those heavy users, such as peer-to-peer file-swapping service.
For example, for some providers, it is not uncommon for P2P traffic to consume up to 70 percent of total capacity. With a traffic management system in place, the provider can create a simple traffic management policy (with a few mouse clicks) that immediately limits P2P traffic to 20 percent, for example, thereby instantly freeing up 50 percent of total Internet bandwidth. Different policies can be set for downstream (to the subscriber) versus upstream (away from the subscriber) traffic flows. P2P, again, is a perfect example.
Premium Services, Premium Rates
For the vast majority of service providers, the most tangible and immediate payback from an investment in traffic management results from delaying the acquisition of additional bandwidth, or even reducing current bandwidth needs. Still, ongoing success requires service providers to move beyond basic bandwidth services to developing premium services for which they can charge premium rates. With increased network intelligence and service control, service providers can target very specific customer groups, such as gamers, VoIP users, high-bandwidth users, casual users, and others, by creating and offering specific service packages and billing options.
Among the services providers might consider are:
Tiered services. The traffic management system can be configured to offer differentiated services with accompanying SLAs on a per-subscriber basis. Providers might consider establishing rate plans for “gold,” “silver,” and “bronze” classes of service, each with predefined parameters for minimum throughput, maximum bandwidth, relative priority (compared to other subscribers) and more. The policy-enforcement capabilities inherent in traffic managers are ideal for enforcing these types of service offerings.
Performance and SLA reports. For business and other customers who wish to monitor how their network service is performing compared with their contracted level of service, the traffic manager can generate a wide variety of reports for which the provider can charge a premium.
Customized service plans and packages. Traffic managers collect a wealth of detailed utilization data, revealing customer usage patters by time of day, application, protocol, byte count and more. Using this valuable marketing data, providers can easily create highly targeted service packages for various customer “clusters.” Examples might include:
- VoIP services for those already using Skype or Vonage
- Gaming services, with increased throughput and highest priority treatment during weekend or evening hours
- Low-cost, low-throughput plans for casual users
- Plans for high-bandwidth users or heavy P2P users
- Various “class-of-service” plans for business users, such as plans that prioritize VPN traffic, or offer higher overall priority than other business users
Usage-based billing. More and more providers are moving toward innovative billing models to help level the playing field between heavy and casual users. Usage-based billing offers the truest form of equality, where subscribers pay by the megabyte. Traffic managers with long-term reporting and accounting software track each and every subscriber session, so this data is easily obtained and integrated with billing systems. Plans could be augmented to include a total monthly byte count, and incremental charges applied when usage caps are exceeded.
Bandwidth on demand and customer self-provisioning. Service providers can create a secure portal where subscribers can dynamically request additional bandwidth for specific periods of time when using certain applications or accessing certain forms of entertainment. For instance, providers might offer subscribers a “turbo button” that allows them to increase their bandwidth from 1mbps to 5mbps for a short period of time while they download a movie. Or, a business subscriber could access a “virtual policy manager” to set and change application-priority policies and see trending and real-time reports.
Similarly, a single customer (or a few customers) can hog bandwidth to the detriment of other users when engaged in heavy P2P downloading. In those cases, capping overall P2P usage to a percentage of total bandwidth is a simple solution. More sophisticated solutions might include limiting P2P on a per-subscriber level, or classifying P2P as low priority, and treating it on a “best-effort” basis.
Boosting the Bottom Line
Traffic management systems provide an inherent “bandwidth fairness” mechanism that levels the playing field and ensures quality service for everyone. Creating policies in a traffic management system that guarantees the priority of Internet sessions is one simple way for service providers to keep their customers happy. As subscriber expectations and competitive pressures on service providers increase, the use of traffic management systems is a multifaceted (and relatively inexpensive) way to quickly gain the flexibility needed to control service usage and to create new services.
Moreover, controlling costs by reducing or eliminating denial-of-service attacks and P2P abuse as well as carefully managing oversubscription ratios keeps customer complaints down and lowers the volume of help desk calls. This further reduces costs while improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Rami Hadar is president and CEO of Allot Communications.
