The Problem of Bandwidth Allocation in the Business Activity of Service Providers: Comparison and Analysis of Costs

One of the fundamental questions in the business activity of service providers is how to allocate existing resources in a WAN computer network in order to meet customers' requirements and manage the bandwidth effectively. The aim of the current paper is to compare the effectiveness of software and hardware-based bandwidth allocation solutions in real-life situations. In Sect. 1, bandwidth allocation solutions selected for the test are introduced. Section 2 addresses costs that an internet provider had to sustain in order to implement individual solutions. Section 3 summarizes installation and configuration issues. In Sect. 4 performance levels achieved are assessed, while in Sect. 5 - additional capabilities and statistics are discussed. The article is concluded with a tabular comparison of discussed approaches.