Abstract

          This paper is a case study about corporate bandwidths, its use in a corporate network, how it can be increased, managed and monitored. The paper would also discuss some issues and problems related to corporate bandwidths, the impact on the corporate performance and productivity. Recommendations on bandwidth issues is also given and stated here. This would serve purpose to all information technology specialists, system analysts, corporations and may provide useful information regarding bandwidth challenges especially to students.

          Research is being done in this area to provide more detailed information about bandwidth issues, its impacts on business, the ways of management and etc. While there are many sites and educational resources available for this topic, however, the resources given are much too limited.

Introduction

          Bandwidth is the most talked about yet least understood aspect of telecommunications (Sevcik, 2001). All too often, investments have been based on misinformation and misleading advice about the quantity and form of bandwidth that will be needed in the future.

What is Bandwidth?

          Basically, in electronic communication bandwidth is used to describe as the width which is usually measured in hertz of a frequency band f2-f1 and is also used to describe a signal in which case the meaning is the width of the smallest frequency band within which the signal can fit. It is the width of the range or band of frequencies that an electronic signal uses on a given transmission medium (Wikipedia, 2005). In this usage, bandwidth is expressed in terms of the difference between the highest frequency signal component and the lowest frequency signal component. Since the frequency of a signal is measured in hertz which is the number of cycles per second, a given bandwidth is the difference in hertz between the highest frequency the signal uses and the lowest frequency it uses.

          Moreover, in computer networks, bandwidth is often used as a synonym for data transfer rate which is the amount of data that can be carried from one point to another in a given period if time. This kind of bandwidth is usually expressed in bits of data per second. Occasionally, it’s expressed as bytes per second. A modem that works at 57,600 bps has twice the bandwidth of a modem that works at 28,800 bps. Generally, a link with a high bandwidth is one that may be able to carry enough information to sustain the succession of images in a video presentation. However, it should be remembered that a real communications path usually consists of a succession of links, each of its own bandwidth (Wikipedia, 2005). If one of these is much slower than the rest, it is said to be a bandwidth bottleneck.

Overview

          The deployment of intelligent networks will have to include increasingly high bandwidth services if business customers are to be drawn back into public network usage. If the intelligent network concept is implemented effectively, the public network will have the opportunity to rapidly increase revenue growth by offering a number of different special services. Some of the things that will drive the demand for higher bandwidths include local area networks and video services. Public networks should be able to successfully compete with private networks because private networks often lack sufficient flexibility and are unable to provide enough control over their technology and costs (Broadcast Engineering, 2000). If public networks can meet the bandwidth challenge, they will be able to provide users with customized bandwidth services, efficiency, economy, survivability and 100 percent availability.

Benefits of the Technology

          Several corporations increasingly depend on moving information around very large networks quickly and dependably. End users on the other hand have become accustomed to purchasing whatever bandwidth is necessary to meet their transport requirements and they continually grows demand for high bandwidth services which has drawn business away from the public network. Moreover, the demand for high bandwidth services now promise to make the public network more attractive to the business community (Miner, 2003). But only if the network can be made more capable and business customers can be assured of the capability and control of their private networks being given to them. Nowadays, end users want to participate in all the phases of networking that is so essential to their business.

          The public network’s bandwidth challenge is also an opportunity. The intelligent network concept could meet the challenge if it is implemented effectively. It offer telephone companies one of their best opportunities for a rapid revenue growth and is the key to many of the special services telcos are eager to bring to the market. Through bandwidth, they can have more control compared to an existing public network (Miner, 2003). Customization, capability and control are three spokes of the popular private network wheel. It also offers standardization which is particularly neat from an economic perspective. By maximizing network efficiency, this would drive the cost of public network service to minimum which would further result to flexibility and efficiency and would join to create new and economic capability.

How They Work

          The job that bandwidth managers do is nothing short of mind-boggling. They can examine each passing packet's full seven-layer information, and track the conversation that the packet belongs to, as well as calculate and monitor the conversation's ongoing bandwidth consumption. At the same time, the bandwidth manager has to determine whether all such conversations are operating within acceptable "class" bandwidth limits (Miner, 2003). And if not, it must then take seemingly drastic action, depending on its instructions, to bring the traffic flows into compliance. Now a few words about words: There is little consistency in the bandwidth-manager marketplace in the use of terms. Take, for example, the chunk of virtual bandwidth that is allocated to a particular traffic type. Packeteer calls this a "partition." Allot calls it a "pipe." Similarly, the bandwidth that's left over after all class allocations have been made, is called "default" bandwidth by Packeteer, and "fallback" bandwidth by Allot. And on it goes. The process of actively managing bandwidth allocation is called "shaping" by some, and "enforcement" or "policing" by others (Lannon, 1988). We will call it bandwidth management. Now what do you call a discrete conversation between two communicating network end-points? Vendors alternately call this a "flow," a "connection," a "stream" and/or a "session." Indeed, with some protocols and applications, the terms might seem synonymous. That's not always the case, however (Miner, 2003). A "connection" can imply just the packets associated with establishing the initial logical link between end-points, like the three-step TCP connection that precedes a Web transaction. A "flow," on the other hand, entails the packets that actually convey content between two end-points, but may not also entail the packets that set up and close the underlying "connection." Richard V. Ford, a product manager with Packeteer, maintains that a "flow" is appreciably different than a "session," especially with regards to VOIP traffic. With Web traffic, a straightforward exchange moves Web pages and elements directly between a client browser and a Web server. But VOW involves two or more third-party dialogues to first set up the actual VOIP connection. Then direct "flows," in the form of RTP streams, carry the actual encoded voice content between the communicating VOW end-points. All of this is a "session;' according to Ford. For consistency, we will refer to all the traffic associated with a dynamic network conversation as a "session," including all the underlying connection set-up as well as the actual information-transfer flow(s).

Recommendations

          For all their flexibility, private networks are not flexible enough. Networks with a single user almost invariably will require that users pay for unneeded and unused capacity (Lannon, 1988). And to add capacity, the user has to add another pipe, recreating the uneconomic situation that existed before capacity was exhausted. Hence, private network customers may have control over their technology. But they do not have control over their costs because they cannot easily partition their networks. The IN concept promises users network control and partitioning and, thus, a new dimension of economic control. "The most important [IN] service is some sort of customer control and reconfiguration and partitioning," Singer says. Today, however, the public network cannot deliver on the promises implicit in the IN concept. "In general, public network control and management systems are less sophisticated than some of the systems available from some private network companies," Adams charges. But as the carriers attach more importance to the IN concept, their vendors are working to change that equation. DSC, for instance, is polishing a centralized management system that "partitions the public network into multiple private networks on a per customer basis," Adams says. The CMS will provide end users with customer control and reconfiguration and billing information on either a dial-up or dedicated access basis. Tellabs' Singer agrees that a "constellation of services" offered via virtual private networks are pivotal to the IN (Lannon, 1988). Offering "customer control and reconfiguration, partitioning and virtual private networks [are] of paramount importance if the RHCs are to demonstrate the capability of providing high-bandwidth services to customers," Singer says. He notes Bell Canada's MegaStream service, which employs Tellabs technology, is the best model for U.S. carriers. The cost of managing larger bandwidths, points out Telinq's Welch, is not higher than the cost of managing lower bandwidths, even though it involves greater complexity (Broadcast Engineering, 2000). Thus, public network management systems designed for higher bandwidth systems should be able to provide end users with the control and partitioning they require without imposing an economic penalty on them. Promising though the situation is, serious problems confront public network planners eager to offer high-bandwidth services economically. "The network will be carrying even more valuable bundles of information," says Walter Ensdorf, product planning and management director, transmission product at AT & T Network Systems. "The network is going to find it ever more important to work on issues of self-healing and survivability. It becomes even more critical that there be network intelligence in place to prevent--or rapidly restore--a failure (Miner, 2003)." "The key is to develop robust implementation plans and deploy management strategies to make the network fail-safe," adds AT & T's Fabricius. Regulation poses another problem. Singer says that Bell Canada's MegaStream is better than anything available in the U.S. (Lannon, 1988), in part because Canadian regulators are more receptive to technical and service innovations than their U.S. counterparts. Specifically, Singer says, U.S. regulators, by forbidding the Bell companies to "pack" data in any proprietary way on the grounds that proprietary packing requires customers to buy a specific vendor's equipment, have prevented end users from turning to Bell-affiliated carriers for interLATA T-1 services. However, T-1 vendors now are developing standard subrate data multiplexing data cards that will permit non-proprietary data packing. Industry sources predict the standard SDM data cards will hit the market during the first quarter of 1989. But internal factors also play a part in retarding the implementation of high-bandwidth techonologies in the U.S. "The RHCs are balkanized," Singer believes. "You have parents that want to go in one direction and you have subsidiaries competing to provide their own solutions to customer problems (Lannon, 1988)."

          Driven largely by their need to provide better high-bandwidth solutions to Corporate America's information requirements, the U.S. carrier industry is moving inexorably toward the IN. But first, technical regulatory and management problems have to be resolved. The bandwidth challenge is multidimensional. but the vision of a network that allows users to enjoy customized high-bandwidth services, efficiency, economy, survivability and 100% availability is very attractive. "That will help sell customers on an intelligent network," chuckles Fabricius. Nobody doubts him.

Bibliography:

Broadcast Engineering (2000). Computers and Networks. Broadcast Engineering, October 1, 2000

Lannon, L. (1988). Bandwidth Challenge. Telephony

Miner, A. (2003). Bandwidth Managers: Going with the flow. Business Communications Review, April 1,           2003

Sevcik, P. (2001). Straight Talk About Bandwidth Capacity. Business Communications Review,           September 1, 2001

Wikepedia (2005). Bandwidth. Wikepedia Ltd.