Discovery And Diminution Of Variance Between Actual And Expected Outsourced Bandwidth Supply In Corporate Network Infrastructure

How much money do you constantly pay to your internet service provider (ISP) for provision of internet services to your organization? How sure are you that you are always receiving the service as per the agreement? The two questions require deeper thought before giving the correct answer since the unfortunate reality is that there are many service contracts or service level agreements that organizations sign with ISPs that are never honored by the ISPs but the clients continue paying for sub-optimal services offered throughout the life of the contract most of which span one year and beyond. The researcher conducted a study, to investigate whether the ISPs of the University were actually constantly providing the quantity of bandwidth subscribed as per the service contract. The unsettling reality was that on various occasions, the ISPs reneged on the contracts by supplying less that subscribed bandwidth. However, when this was discovered by the client and reported to the ISPs, they owned up since there was overwhelming evidence. One ISP even committed to provision more than double the bandwidth for three months in lieu of the lost bandwidth in order to avoid litigation and to safeguard the business. Other factors that were discovered to affect the internet bandwidth availability were link stability and DoS attacks targeting DNS and gateway IP addresses. It was concluded that a client should always deploy tools to help monitor and report on bandwidth quantity supplied vis a vis subscribed bandwidth.