KANATA, Ontario -- Bridgewater Systemsä, a provider of dynamic IP data service fulfillment and assurance solutions, today announced Dynamic Bandwidth Manager, which enables broadband carriers to manage peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic and its associated impact on customer satisfaction and network costs.

In addition, Dynamic Bandwidth Manager helps carriers generate new revenue by offering bandwidth-on-demand capabilities to their existing customers for better gaming experiences, faster uploads/downloads and voice and video services. Beyond this, the new offering helps carriers realise additional revenues by offering new low-price, lower-bandwidth services that subscribers can speed up via on-demand turbo controls for a fee.

"Bridgewater Systems has a history of providing real time control of services and provisioning them dynamically as users access them," said Celine Bak, vice president of products, Bridgewater Systems. "Through Dynamic Bandwidth Manager, DSL carriers can reduce the spiraling costs of P2P traffic. These same capabilities enable them to generate significant new revenue streams from existing customers and attract new ones by offering services attractive to dial-up Internet users. For all of these new services, carriers can realise significant savings - not only on users who frequently change their plans, but also with the initial user set up. Dynamic Bandwidth Manager can be the basis of significant cost reduction in service provisioning. The business case for this solution is excellent, Dynamic Bandwidth Manager delivers a return on investment well within a year."

Control P2P Costs

As DSL providers have experienced, very active users of P2P file-sharing software for music and video downloads can have a drastic impact on network load and on the bandwidth of other subscribers. Dynamic Bandwidth Manager enables service providers to control P2P traffic on a per-user, per-session basis. As a first step this enables DSL providers to get control of their network. In addition, Dynamic Bandwidth Manager also enables DSL providers to offer higher tiers of service that include P2P as part of the offering, thereby turning P2P into a managed, revenue-generating opportunity.

Revenue Generating Applications

Dynamic Bandwidth Manager can deliver several revenue-generating applications for different sets of users. These include the following:

Users of online games consume large amounts of bandwidth - both upstream and downstream - with issues like latency and jitter affecting the quality of their experience. At the click of an on-screen turbo button, users can increase bandwidth speed from 512 k to 3MB and reduce latency and jitter for a set time period or the duration of the game. Parental control features will enable adults to manage the frequency of use. Teleworkers can automatically boost bandwidth for a set period of time each day or on an ad-hoc basis in the evening and weekends to provide a connection suitable for enterprise applications in their home offices. Dynamic Bandwidth Manager enables them to set the boost parameters themselves for ultimate flexibility. Subscribers can download larger files more quickly than would otherwise be possible with their service. Examples include software packages such as upgrades, music, videos, etc. available via Internet download. Bandwidth-on-demand capabilities address these discrete needs.

Dynamic Bandwidth Manager provides simple and flexible integration to existing provisioning and billing systems, along with the ability to synchronise data automatically from existing databases of user information. This enables carriers to deploy it quickly and start generating revenue without major upgrades. Dynamic Bandwidth Manager interfaces with billing systems to enable carriers to bill on a per-use, scheduled basis or monthly basis for the service.

Dynamic Bandwidth Manager is deployed within a North American carrier and in trials with a UK-based carrier. Dynamic Bandwidth Manager will be generally available to carriers by the end of the year. Pricing is based individually upon an expected return-on-investment of less than one year.

Bridgewater Systems Corp.