Westnet has been trialling some traffic prioritisation tools on our network over the past year with very positive results. As a result, we will continue to use the tools on an ongoing basis.

The key purpose of the traffic prioritisation tools is to ensure latency sensitive applications such as online gaming, web browsing, e-mail and VOIP are not negatively impacted by peer to peer applications. The outcome of the trial illustrates traffic prioritisation has produced no noticeable degradation of peer to peer speeds while ensuring applications such as online gaming, web browsing, e-mail and VOIP receive the bandwidth required.

An important point to note is that Westnet has not enforced a fixed limit on the amount of bandwidth available to peer to peer applications. The amount of bandwidth available to peer to peer traffic is dynamically limited only when the bandwidth required to service the other applications exceeds expectations. This ensures peer to peer is only impacted when absolutely necessary to protect the performance of the other applications. Westnet believes this provides members with the best of both worlds; protection of the performance of key applications without any noticeable impact on peer to peer performance.

The trial was conducted in WA, NSW and QLD and Westnet intends to extend the benefits of traffic prioritisation to other states in the future.

Posted by Ryan Bunter

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Coming Soon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.