Allot looks to help servers with bandwidth congestion problems

Allot Communications is offering to help service providers better control bandwidth on high-speed networks and prevent clogs that can happen when a few consume too much.

The initiative builds on Allot’s September acquisition of NetReality and software enhancements to the company’s NetEnforcer networking platform.

“Our biggest opportunity area is in cable and DSL networks,” said Greg Hutterer, Allot’s director of carrier sales.

Allot’s products are aimed at two areas: the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer applications for downloading music and video and the spread of unauthorized networks that use Wi-Fi connections.

High-speed service providers, Hutterer said, face a double-edged sword. While they sell the benefits that come from high-speed connectivity, they must control peer-to-peer usage or face network slowdowns.

“A lot of the carriers and MSOs don’t want to stop the peer-to-peer traffic altogether, because that’s one of the services they want on the network,” Hutterer said. “They just want to control how it behaves on the network.”

Allot’s products help network providers establish policies to shape the traffic.

“They still let peer-to-peer traffic go through, but give it a lower priority versus browsing and some of the other things,” he said. “All the users are getting a universal experience or the same experience for what they’re paying.”

Traffic shaping also takes place in the upstream, where many carriers face even more serious problems, he said, because “you have a lot of traffic that’s being generated outside the cable network, outside the customer base, [such as] uploading files from your customers on the network.”

The second problem Allot is tackling--unauthorized networks--is growing. About 5% of consumers are now sharing their high-speed connections via Wi-Fi networks, Hutterer said.

“This happens mostly with cable providers, but it also happens with DSL, especially in the high-density areas,” he said.

Allot’s product lets service providers limit the number of connections to a receiving device or modem.

“This is something you can’t do with a router or switches. We have a great interface for doing usage-based billing and reporting, but we offer the alternative of just limiting the connections per user. That way, hopefully, some of those users who aren’t currently signed up, will sign up,” he said.