Traffic Management

Medusa Traffic Manger provides you with many economic benefits:

• The ability to sell guaranteed bandwidth and generated good revenues
• The default "conditioning" of your Internet service so that it feels fast and is not blocked by low value traffic
• Setting different shared priorities by Service Groups or users, so you can charge by performance
• Control of abuse
• Facilities to manage your own applications such as Voice over IP and conferencing.

The Medusa Traffic Manager has default settings that work well in most shared space - you don't need to set it up to get immediate and appropriate traffic control. Don't reinvent the wheel - Medusa knows what works in Business Centres and shared space.

Medusa Traffic Manager sorts all traffic into a master 9-level queue. Each Internet Connection, Bandwidth Slice and Service Group has their own set of 9 queues as well. By default the traffic is prioritised as :

• High priority to low-latency applications
• Medium priority to Interactive traffic like web applications
• Low Priority to bulk traffic like downloads and Email
• No Priority to unassigned traffic (could be specific customers or applications or both)

Medusa ensures the High Priority is always sent but also ensures that all Priority levels get some share of the available bandwidth. This is often referred to as "Quality of Service".  It is easy to create custom profiles as well, or ask our support teams to do these for you.

Medusa allows you to set Quality of Service in different ways including:

• Specific Customers
• Service Plan groups of customers
• Specific Applications

You can also set Bandwidth LIMITS the same way. A Bandwidth limit allows:

• A burst of such much volume at peak bandwidth
• Restriction to a lower bandwidth when the user exceeds the initial burst volume
• Recovery of the burst entitlement when theuser lowers their bandwidth below the limit level.

A Bandwidth slice is a guarantee of bandwidth. Bandwidth Slices allow operators to create the equivalent of lease lines, but of any bandwidth.

When you allocate a slice it means that the customer or customers will absolutely receive that guarantee... but only if they need it.

This is NOT dedicated - the bandwidth is never lost if not required. When the guarantee is not or partially in use, the spare bandwidth is available to the shared bandwidth users.

Applications of guarantees include:

• Ensure applications with minimumbandiwdth requirements will work
• Create equivalent of lease lines
• Create a guarantee across a number of customers to protect them
• Reserve bandwidth for applications such as VoIP or Conferencing

Each Slice has its own 9-level queue system (see QoS) which can be independently changed in special circumstances.

Version 1.9 - Expandable Slices

The release during 2010 of version 1.9 provides operators with an extra special feature - Expandable Slices.

When the user of the slice exceeds their guarantee, the expandable bandwidth allows them to use any dditional bandwidth unused by the shared users. The upper limit of this expansion can be set if required. Thus in the example here a company has a guarantee of 2 Mbps bandwidth but can go up to 4 Mbps if there is availabel capacity. Shoud teh shared users use all available bandwidth the customer can still fall back to their guarantee level in perfect safety.

Most centres charge a premium for this expandable bandwidth.

The “Bandwidth Monitor” provides a second-by-second display of bandwidth flowing through your Internet connections.

You will see a number of bars referring to bandwidth slices you have created as well as the Internet connections.

As traffic flows in these you will see that a grey bar descends from the top of your internet circuit(s). This indicates the action of the guarantee – which removes the burst bandwidth from unguaranteed customers.

The colors indicate quality of service priorities. The higher the number, the higher the priority.