What is Bursting
There's a lot of talk about network traffic "bursting" and it can be very confusing. I pulled up some documents about the burstiness of internet traffic and it made my head spin. Complex equations with scatter charts. Crazy stuff. A new way to explain it is badly needed.
When you think about bursts, think about how you use your web browser every day. You download a page, and then you read it. So you're using a lot of bandwidth for a second or two, and then you're using none for 30 seconds, perhaps more. When you check your email, it's the same thing. Depending on what service you use, you either get 1 email at a time to your browser or your phone, or you get all of the new messages at regular intervals. Again, you're using a lot of bandwidth for a few seconds, and then none for as long as it takes you to read your email and to compose a new message.
Hard vs Soft Limits
A hard limit simulates a wire. If you have a gigabit ethernet port on. your computer, you're limited to 1gb/s to download data. It's impossible for it to go faster, A hard limit will cap the device at a specific speed, no matter what a user is doing. It will taka a bit longer to download mail, web sites may load slower
The problem with hard limits is you always have to way
If everyone on the internet just used browsers and email, there would be no need to talk about Traffic Management. But that's not the case. For every casual user who only turns their computer on for 15 minutes a day to read/respond to a few emails, there's another user who has all kinds of streaming music, videos, or filesharing apps It's this second type of user that requires management.
Browsing
For browsing, hard limits will cause the pages to load slower (assuming a low limit, say 1Mb/s). Depending on the page, it can extend a page load from 2 or 3 seconds to 5 or 6 seconds. If your network has limited bandwidth, however, it will keep the customer to his allocation.
Soft limits allow a "burst" which in most cases will allow pages to laod or small amounts of data to be transferred at higher speed. Bandwidth is averages over a longer period of time, so customers that use less bandwidth overall can get bursts of bandwidth to improve their experience.
Streaming Audio and Video
On high bandwidth networks, streaming services are your friend. Streams are generally contained and fairly well behaved, given enough bandwidth. An HD video need 4Mb/s. Audio about 320Kb/s. If your customer has. enough bandwidth, these services will consume as much bandwidth as they need to keep up. With a lower bandwidth limits, these services can usually adapt by lower the quality. So there's no real difference in how you lmanage these types of services.
However, in a low bandwidth environment, bideos need to be dlownloaded before they are watched. When you rent a movie, it may be downloaded to a device and held there for the rental period. Those types of services are they onces that can dominate too much bandwidth and affect your other customers if you don't manage it
Downloads
Traffic shaping controls downloads so that they use less bandwidth for longer periods of time. Traffic on your network is reduces, because servers cannot flood your network with huge windows of data.
The ET/BWMGR keeps your network under your control.
Bursting Made Easy in ET.BWMGR V8
Our new Soft Limts internalize the burst settings so you don't need knobs and settings to try to figure out how to manage it.