1. What is traffic prioritisation?2. Why do we use traffic prioritisation?3. How is the traffic prioritised?4. How does prioritised traffic compare to unshaped traffic?5. Does Traffic Prioritisation help during high-demand or outage situations?
This is a traffic management method used to assign different traffic protocols such as Gaming, P2P or VoIP different priority levels
The broadband network is like a highway. When the traffic is light, all vehicles can move at their speed-limit. Some lanes of the highway have been reserved for important traffic, such as buses or emergency vehicles. During rush hour, most vehicles are forced to slow down. However, the traffic on the reserved lanes can continue to travel at high speed.
Why do we use traffic prioritisation?
We are always open and up front about our products and services, we want our customers to know what to expect from our ADSL packages. Most ISPs prioritise traffic in some way, we're one of the few who are happy to share these specific details with our customers.
- To ensure our customers receive a fast, quality and sustainable online experience all the traffic on our network is prioritised by type.
- Without traffic prioritisation, P2P and other high volume, download traffic could flood the network and cause slower speeds for time-sensitive applications such as games, VPN, VoIP and streaming.
- Provide a service relative to the amount each customer pays in terms of usage and experience.
- Preventing non-time sensitive download traffic from slowing down interactive applications like web-browsing and email.
- Ability to adjust the network in the event of an unusual peak in traffic or freak situations (e.g. a network outage).
How is the traffic prioritised?
Below are the various Bandwidth Priority Profiles that explain specifically how traffic is prioritised.
An application that is not using the standard port may not be identified correctly which will result in the traffic being classified as "Other" and therefore having a lower priority applied.
Ranking - Priority from highest to lowest:
- "Top" is the highest prioritised traffic, it will be prioritised over any other priorities.
- "High" has more importance/priority than "Medium"
- "Medium" is the same as "Best Effort" unless there is high congestion on the network, then "Medium" traffic will be prioritised over "Best Effort".
How does prioritised traffic compare to unshaped traffic?
With unshaped, all traffic types are treated the same. While this may sound attractive, in truth there is no intelligent traffic management, thus it is likely that protocols such as P2P and other download traffic could choke the network, since no provider sells adsl on a 1:1
contention ratio, this could slow down time critical applications (games, VoIP VPN and streaming) and interactive applications (Web-browsing and email).
By using traffic prioritisation we can ensure that critical applications have a higher priority and will be fully operational regardless of the load on the network. In addition, by effectively utilising traffic priority management we also reduce the chance of our network becoming congested in the first place.
Does Traffic Prioritisation help during high-demand or outage situations?
In high demand situations where unusual events result in high network traffic, such as streaming coverage of live sporting events, windows and game updates, non-real-time applications are de-prioritised. To maintain a usable experience for interactive applications there may be tactical rate-limits applied to certain traffic types. In this scenario the objective is to protect the experience of time-critical and interactive applications.
During outages we can manage our network's lowered capacity according to the conditions the network is under and therefore alter the customer experience according to the different demands.
In an event of a large scale network failure for example, if we were to lose a central pipe, we might have to block all advanced protocols on all accounts and rate limit all accounts for all other traffic to provide at least a bare minimum real-time service for as many people as possible. For example, we may limit all P2P and FTP traffic and rate limit other traffic at 512kbps.
