Congestion Management is a topic that comes up in almost all of our high level discussions with service providers world-wide. This topic came up a few weeks ago with a customer, and one of their potential solutions to determining how their network was performing caught my attention. The system that they were looking at to determine if they were providing the promised bandwidth to customers, determining if there was congestion on the network, and measuring the “application experience” for customers was an active probe that sent data from the customer premise to the network core with a number of different protocols and data rates. Based on the network performance for that probe, their success or failure would be determined. Although this solution is technically capable of providing this information, I am not convinced that this type of solution is a good one, because the solution itself is a potential source of problems (both for the customer and the network). Read more [+]