WHY SMART GUARD : quality assured products

Consider Smart Guard Bandwidth Manager if you want to:

Deliver the experience : Deliver the differentiated, personalized services that match your subscribers' lifestyle, desired service characteristics and budget, while ensuring consistent levels of quality for an unbeatable experience.

Faster time to market : Deliver the differentiated, personalized services that match your subscribers' lifestyle, desired service characteristics and budget, while ensuring consistent levels of quality for an unbeatable experience.

Profitability : Enhance your mobile broadband offerings to deliver highly profitable services, attract subscribers and reduce churn. Optimize your available network bandwidth to save up to 25% in future capex expenditures.

Bandwidth equals money : Bandwidth costs thousands of dollars a month, and anything you can do to lower your bandwidth consumption will save your money in the long run.

Improved Internet experience : Bandwidth management can make the difference between a network that’s perceived as sluggish and unresponsive and one that seems fast and reliable. For delay-sensitive applications, such as Voice over IP, bandwidth management might make the difference between a device that works and one that’s unusable.

Fairness through compromise : Someone accessing a low-­bandwidth, text­-based site shouldn’t have to put up with a slow connection because someone else is downloading 5-GB movies onto their laptop. Going to the opposite extreme and blocking all video traffic or all file­-sharing traffic is also unfair because it penalizes the moderate, occasional downloader as much as it hurts the patron downloading 50 albums every afternoon. Students often use BitTorrent or streaming video to access lectures and other files related to their classes. In other words, it’s not always the particular protocol or application that’s a problem; it’s the few folks who use more than their share. Bandwidth management strikes a compromise. You can limit bandwidth usage on a per-­user basis, a per­-protocol basis or both. No single user or type of traffic can hog everything, but they won’t be completely blocked either.

Improved traffic prioritization : Although it’s hard to give one stream of patron traffic priority over another based on your own judgments regarding the appropriateness of the content, libraries often have valid reasons for giving some bandwidth preferential treatment. Certain voice and video applications simply won’t function if they don’t have reliable bandwidth and low latency. Also, you may decide that traffic from staff machines should have priority over patron traffic since your library depends on the effective, reliable transmission of catalog records and other files.

Opportunities for remote and rural libraries : Unfortunately, some parts of the country still don’t have access to high­-speed data lines, or the prices are prohibitive. In these cases, bandwidth management can make a big difference. Even if you don’t have money to spend on a high­-end commercial device, you can put some open­-source software on a desktop computer with two network cards and use that as your Web caching server or your traffic­-shaping server.