Better bandwidth brokering: Ukiah software helps ISPs use their resources in a smarter way

A new product designed to help Internet service providers use their network assets more efficiently could help pave the way to graded levels of service and a new basis for billing for the on-line market.

NetRoad TrafficWARE, from Campbell, Calif.-based Ukiah Software Inc., is a Windows NT-based software system designed to control Internet traffic and eliminate bandwidth bottlenecks that can choke Internet access points.

The system employs flow control and queuing techniques to deliver end-to-end bandwidth management for TCP/IP networks. When it ships in December, TrafficWARE will be the first NT-based bandwidth monitoring and control product on the market, said Gordon Smith, vice president of marketing at Ukiah.

"This will allow TrafficWARE to be easily integrated with our company's NetRoad firewall products, giving ISPs a second way of differentiating their services," said Smith. Like Ukiah's FireWALL security product, the management of TrafficWARE is integrated with industry-standard, lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP)-compliant directory services, such as Netscape's Directory Server and Novell's NDS, and will be integrated with future LDAP-based directory services such as Microsoft's Active Directory.

For the network administrator, this will simplify the process of managing traffic both for bandwidth management and for security by using the existing network management infrastructure so traffic policies can be based on already-defined users and groups. TrafficWARE differentiates the levels of service provided to different users and Web pages, providing an opportunity to create a new business model using a tiered pricing schedule tied to levels of service.

TrafficWARE also allows carriers to more effectively sell excess capacity at off-peak times to generate additional revenues without degradation of service to premium customers.

The system also targets congestion problems and the future threat of erratic network performance caused by push technologies and other bandwidth-intensive applications. "The software allows ISPs to use their links more efficiently and reduces the number of dropped packets and retransmissions" said Smith. "That by itself can reduce the amount of traffic by as much as 20%."