Steve Powell, Viatel's Product Manager, said.

"Today shared broadband in Britain cannot be relied upon to deliver the speed and latency required for particular business critical applications including converged voice communications using VoIP and other time critical services. Implementation of RT QoS will lead to a situation in which bandwidth can be dedicated to an individual line and will therefore never be subject to the effects of contention.

The eventual deployment of this technology will be a major breakthrough in the viability of shared broadband for business and we are obviously very excited to be one of the few companies involved with this trial.

At present, businesses that cannot risk using contended services are limited to using more expensive offerings like leased lines, Ethernet or even dedicated broadband lines. RT QoS removes the effects of contention by adding the ability to dedicate a quantity of bandwidth to specific subscribers or applications.

The amount of bandwidth that can be dedicated to a particular line can range from 100kbps up to nearly 5Mbps depending on line type and performance. With this service customers will enjoy enhanced management of their networks and will be able to make prioritisation decisions based on key SLA metrics of Latency, Packet Loss and Jitter."