Browser-based bandwidth: Digital Island service lets customers adjust capacity through Web interface

A data service provider based in Hawaii has announced a managed bandwidth service that will permit its customers to economically adjust bandwidth allocations daily over the World Wide Web.

Digital Island, which began operating early this year (Telephony, Jan. 27, page 30), has introduced a service called Managed Bandwidth, which permits its customers-typically, multinational corporations-to adjust the amounts of bandwidth allocated daily by as much as 1 kb/s per circuit. The Web interface processes the requests that managers send and confirms via e-mail that the resources are available.

This allows Digital Island's customers to tailor their network use to their business needs and reduce costs, according to Ron Higgins, president of the Honolulu-based service provider.

"If there's one day a month or a quarter when you send out software updates or large reports, it doesn't make sense to buy bandwidth just to accommodate that one fairly rare occasion,"Higgins said.

The service allows customers to request changes through a secure Web site as little as 24 hours in advance, and it allows customers to avoid re-writing applications to comply with the resource reservation protocol, a new Internet bandwidth management specification used in traditional "mesh" networks.

"We can deliver this service because of the 'star' architecture of our network," said Higgins. This architecture, which draws on Digital Island's unique location at the hub of several trans-Pacific fiber optic networks, permits easier establishment of point-to-point connections than mesh networks like the Internet.

The service also provides a Managed Bandwidth Web interface that shows the current total managed bandwidth allocation, the current allocation of managed bandwidth on each link, and the amount of managed bandwidth available on each link. The service generates monthly reports for each customer to help them make use of the service.

One analyst said that Digital Island's network architecture allows the company to provide a managed bandwidth solution more economically than other carriers.

"The major carriers have had managed bandwidth solutions for over a year, but the costs associated with managing those services over traditional networks have forced them to charge premium prices for the service," said Mark Winther, an analyst at New York-based market research firm IDC-Link. "That doesn't make them much more attractive than private lines economically, and they're more trouble to manage.

"Digital Island's backbone is Internet protocol-based, more flexible and can use a completely different cost structure," he said.

Because of its network architecture, Digital Island has a jump on its competitors, which include Global One, IBM, InfoNet and Equant, Winther said.

"Digital Island's approach allows them to build one facility, and because of the time zone in which it sits, it can use that facility to manage efficiently, 24 hours a day, as peak usage moves from one section of the network to the next," Winther said.

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