User-Based Monitoring and Control

Abstract

Novel tools and techniques to give a customer greater visibility into network performance and / or utilization, particularly with respect to the customer's broadband connection to a provider's access network (and / or the Internet more generally). Some tools can track the amount of bandwidth assigned to each class of service on a customer's broadband connection, and / or the bandwidth provided to each of the devices on the customer's premises network. These values can be used as inputs to a state machine that governs the use of the broadband connection.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCES TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]The present disclosure may be related to the following commonly assigned applications / patents:[0002]This application claims the benefit, under 35 U.S.C. §119(e), from the following co-pending applications, the entire disclosure of each of which is hereby incorporated by reference, as if set forth in full in this document, for all purposes: provisional U.S. Patent Application No. 61 / 416,600, filed Nov. 23, 2010, by Michael K. Bugenhagen and titled “Line Performance Metrics Customer Service Point”; provisional U.S. Patent Application No. 61 / 429,866 filed Jan. 5, 2011, by Michael K. Bugenhagen and titled “Line Performance Metrics Customer Service Point”; provisional U.S. Patent Application No. 61 / 435,056 filed Jan. 21, 2011, by Michael K. Bugenhagen and titled “Access Control”; and provisional U.S. Patent Application No. 61 / 481,282 filed May 2, 2011, by Michael K. Bugenhagen and titled “Communications Path State Machine.”[0003]The respectiv...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0013]Merely by way of example, a signaling point might track throughput at either end of the access network, and/or at the residential gateway and one or more customer devices. The signaling point might provide alarms for packet loss conditions and/or busy indicators, which can serve as a “busy signal” for the customer and/or any applications, to let the application/customer know whether there is sufficient bandwidth available to start another network session or if the customer's WiFi connection has degrad

Problems solved by technology

Currently, however, providers lack adequate facilities to provide customer feedback regarding network performance and utilization, even though the customer might know the capacity it has agreed to purchase from the provider.

Given that IP protocols are generally designed to share the available bandwidth and ‘adjust” to each other, when a congestion event occurs all the traffic using that same class of service, or a lower class, experiences congestion.

The fact that no single customer device sees all the composite traffic flow makes this a very difficult problem for the customer or provider to address.

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