Q. How does the SN Firewall help me with bandwidth problems?

[1] Security reduces network congestion by excluding external 'junk' packets. Apart from the packets from attackers (i.e. hackers or worms), there are very many 'junk' packets. Generally junk packets are more numerous, especially where the ISP has many consumer level customers. These packets may be, for example, Netbios (Microsoft Filesharing protocol) broadcasts from other computers on your ISP. These junk packets use up your bandwidth and choke your network, unless they are blocked at the point of access. The SN Firewall keeps this junk out and so improves your overall bandwidth utilisation.

[2] The SN Firewall also has bandwidth management features. You can allocate bandwidth to users/servers by source or destination IP address, Port, Packet size and also IP Flags. You can allocate fixed amounts of bandwidth by using Pipes or allow users to have access to a certain percentage of available bandwidth by using Queues.

For example, a call center may need to have 40kbps per agent. We can fix that by allocating 40k per IP, where the IP is the address of the agents phone.

[3] One common problem experienced by everyone is that if there is a lot of downloading happening (whereby the download bandwidth is fully utilised) the uplink cannot be fully used. The high volume of the downloading blocks (or at least slows down) the starting of new connections and so impedes the full utilisation of the uplink. By engineering the priorities of the various packet types your Xnet firewall can allow you to use your bandwidth to the fullest - both uplink and downlink at the same time.