Bandwidth Shaping

Webopedia™ describes Bandwidth Shaping as “the process of managing or controlling (shaping) portions of network connection to the outside world and determining an allowed Bandwidth consumption based on types of activities”.

Bandwidth in this context refers to a maximum available network usage as measured in bytes (or some other units) per second.

For the ISP or WISP, Bandwidth Shaping is used primarily as a means to ensure a provided service level or capacity. For example, the ISP or WISP might sell three separate Internet services, each with its own available bandwidth and price.

By deploying a Bandwidth Shaper, the service provider can deliver the promised Bandwidth to their customers.

Secondarily, Bandwidth Shaping is used to throttle customer Bandwidth in a fair manner whenever available up stream Bandwidth or other resources are exceeded.

Lastly, Bandwidth Shapers often include monitoring and offer operational view of networks, bandwidth usage, bottleneck, etc.

BillMax has integrations with several products that do bandwidth shaping and can easily be modified to support other products. These Integrations maintain ISP or WISP subscriber accounts in these products. The data provisioned typically includes customer ID, IP address, access point,and bandwidth plan.