Bandwidth Commander: Bandwidth Usage Management

Video killed the radio star. Don’t let it kill your broadband business!

You see it happening. Bandwidth usage continues to rise. Customers are staying online longer and watching more video. It’s not just short clips on YouTube or Facebook anymore. It’s full-length TV shows and movies from sites like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. It’s not just a handful of young folks sitting in front of a PC, or the occasional video pioneer streaming to their TV using bleeding-edge technology and duct tape. Blu-ray players, gaming consoles and boxes like Roku make it relatively easy now for the average subscriber to watch Internet video on their big-screen TV from their big, comfy couch. And let’s not forget about smart TVs. That’s not an oxymoron. We’re talking about tens of millions of sets shipping this year that can connect to the Internet right out of the box. What’s worse, as bandwidth use in your network goes up there is often no corresponding increase in revenue to help pay for more.

Scary, huh? Especially when you don’t have a way to automatically and fairly enforce policies for broadband usage management. It’s time to break the cycle. It’s time to implement a bandwidth management solution that will help control costs, as well as gain additional revenue from those subscribers using the most of your resources. How do you do that? Don’t panic. We can help. ZCorum’s Bandwidth Commander provides the comprehensive reporting, automated customer notifications and dynamic bandwidth policy management needed to put you back in control of your broadband business. You’ll be able to implement bandwidth usage management in a “net-neutral” way by fairly enforcing bandwidth usage limits based on your pricing tiers and network use policies, which will reduce costs, improve your overall customer experience, and provide opportunities for more revenue. Speaking of more revenue, check out what’s possible with our handy Revenue Calculation Tool.

Accurately Track Individual Subscriber Usage

Bandwidth Commander uses IPDR (Internet Protocol Detail Records) data to collect usage from your DOCSIS-compatible CMTS. You don’t need to wonder whether the usage you are seeing and reporting to the subscriber is really accurate. What you see is what they used.

Track and Enforce Usage Policies Any Day or Time

Monthly usage caps are a great way to price your service, but they won’t do a lot to bring down network congestion, especially in the early part of the month. In addition to keeping track of a subscriber’s monthly usage, Bandwidth Commander monitors usage hour by hour, every single day. You can set daily quotas and sliding windows that can be enforced any time, any day, which keeps you in command of your bandwidth even on the first day of the month.

Dynamically Apply Bandwidth Usage Limits

Bandwidth Commander looks at resources that are being used in real-time. Limits can be put in place dynamically, which will help reduce usage during peak hours and make for a better customer experience.  Have a class of customers that you don’t want limited at all? No problem. Those customers who want to pay more to ensure they will have bandwidth when they need it can remain unchanged when policies are being enforced.

Automatically Communicate with Customers

Bandwidth Commander can automatically send an email to subscribers when action has been taken based on a bandwidth policy. Upgrade options include the ability to send notifications via SMS text messaging.

Control Costs, Boost Revenue and Increase Satisfaction

Bandwidth Commander puts you back in control of your broadband network. Not only will you have a tool that helps reduce bandwidth, especially during peak hours, you can gain new revenue from subscribers who are your highest bandwidth consumers. Most customers subscribe to the lowest-priced tier as long as the speed suits their need, but they can also be some of the heaviest users of bandwidth. Bandwidth Commander gives you the tools needed to analyze bandwidth use and then create packages and policies that will allow you to migrate heavier bandwidth users to a higher-priced package. Other users may decide to limit their bandwidth use, or modify their use so they are using more of their bandwidth during non-peak hours. This will reduce spending on equipment and circuits later, as well as increase customer satisfaction as you reduce overall congestion on your network.