Traffic Management/Shaping

It’s increasingly popular for ISP’s to adopt some form of traffic shaping or management technology, which allows bandwidth prioritisation of selected services or during specific time periods. For example, a provider may allow unrestricted access to HTTP (websites) and E-Mail, yet limit the usage of P2P (File Sharing) services.

This technology can be a good or bad thing depending on how it’s implemented and whether you’re a user of the services that benefit. Increasingly providers are extending the use of traffic management to include normal services too, such as FTP access.

Fears have grown that the increasing use of such technology, while beneficial to the ISP and technically users, will conflict with the growth of data eating online content. In addition some services (online gaming etc.) do not function properly under traffic management.

Poor ISP management and provisioning

Like it or not, ISP’s are the leaders of their respective networks and any choice they make about capacity and package pricing plays a significant part in the end-user experience. Offering products at absurdly low prices often makes it more difficult to afford extra capacity when needed, thus the less you pay the less you’re likely to get.

Poor management and planning can also cause providers to be unprepared for market changes, which is a potential death sentence in the current climate.

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