Hello,
the discussion here is getting interesting for me, because people are
talking about not only capping the Bandwidth but also capping the volume
of the traffic sent by a customer.
So far people are used to do the capping of bandwidth with a Bandwidth
Manager device, which does traffic shaping based on e.g.
application/protocols, etc.
Now, since we are talking about capping on the volume, what is the
product available on the market which can do both bandwidth and volume
capping ?
thanks,
Muljawan
For me, products that do capping on choke points are of very little
interest since they do not scale and often hinder redundancy (all traffic
has to go through a single point).
I prefer to do this on the access port (port of entry), so for me this
would be done at DSLAM or switch port level depending on access type.
For DSL, this can be done at the BRAS. The most popular vendors
(Juniper and Redback) have support for dynamic subscriber profiles.
Individual customers can be 'squeezed' when they have reached their
cap. Accounting is done via radius records (start/stop/intermediate).
Capping at the DSLAM level could also be an option if you manage the
DSLAMs. It is usually the case that dslams are operated by a separate
NAP, usually the incumbent. In this case, capping at dslam is virtually
impossible, due to administrative overhead.
Capping at the BRAS is not the ideal solutions (policing should happen
as close to edge as possible) but from an operational standpoint,
this is usually the only way.
For cable, capping is done on the cable modem. Metering per sub is done
on the CMTS. Capping, metering via SNMP.
Ethernet - edge switch.
-walter