Examples

• You are the owner of a LAN leasing a network connection from a service provider. You can use Solaris Bandwidth Manager to make sure you make the most efficient use of the capacity you lease. Bandwidth management makes sure that your higher-priority traffic is sent first, but that you always get the maximum use of the capacity you are paying for. It is no longer be necessary to over-specify your requirements just to guarantee that priority traffic can be sent. You might even be able to reduce the capacity you lease.

• You are the owner of a WAN providing network services to many clients. Solaris Bandwidth Manager enables you to regulate the traffic in your network. With Solaris Bandwidth Manager you can provide a guaranteed minimum of bandwidth to a client, and as a bonus, provide additional bandwidth from time to time when it is not required by other clients. Since you know the level of bandwidth guaranteed, capacity planning is be both easier and more accurate.

• You are a web service provider, hosting several web sites on behalf of commercial companies. Solaris Bandwidth Manager enables you to guarantee your client companies that a given bandwidth is available to the customers visiting their web sites. Today, many web providers' charges are based either on disk space usage or on the number of times a site is visited. Disk space used is not a good indication of the cost to the provider, since a small site that is visited frequently can be as expensive to provide as a large site that is visited less frequently. Using the number of visits to a site is a better indicator of the cost to the provider, but is potentially an unbounded cost for the client. With Solaris Bandwidth Manager you can charge clients for a guaranteed bandwidth for their web sites.

• You are an ISP providing services to many customers. Solaris Bandwidth Manager enables you to provide different classes of services to different customers. For example, you could offer Premium and Standard services, with different guaranteed minimum access levels, to suit the needs and budgets of your customers.