Preseem – the Magic Pill that Saved our Network

I often get the comment that our internet speeds “feel” so much quicker than our competitors.

Movies stream at higher quality, videos load faster and generally, there is much less buffering.

More than 80% of the traffic passing our network is videos or VOIP (Voice over IP), also known as voice calls. This traffic must be prioritised. The bottom line is that if a video streams properly and a voice call doesn’t break up, my clients are happy.

We do this by utilising a hardware device called “Preseem.” In the early days, we used to manage our client bandwidth directly on the routers, as all internet service providers do.

Managing client bandwidth this way needed improvement for me. A misbehaving app or PC on a client network would kill their link, causing videos to buffer and Whatsapp calls to disconnect.

I was apprehensive the day we plugged Preseem into our network. Gerrie Nagelhout, the MD of Preseem, encouraged me to switch off all traffic shaping on our router. I did it hesitantly, ready to turn it back on immediately. I was worried that our network would be flooded with rogue PC data, downloading movies and software, killing our fiber backbone to Liquid Telecoms.

The opposite happened. It was as if our network had swallowed a magic pill. The erratic traffic smoothed out, and all the spikes and jitters on the network calmed down to a smooth, tidy flow of data.

PCs infected with viruses, devices running huge updates or using torrents to download movies are usually the culprits. Preseem slows their downloads down and prioritises the vital traffic on a client’s network, namely video and voice. Essentially, Preseem catches the data hogs on a network and sends this traffic to the back of the queue.

Don’t just take my word for it, here are some reviews from fellow ISPs using Preseem:

“Our total bandwidth utilisation dropped about 15 to 20 per cent and my trouble-call text messages and phone calls have dropped about 80 per cent. Amazing!”

JEFF TAYLOR

CEO, Falcon Internet

AND

“Preseem takes all the guesswork out of traffic shaping, it just works! This is one of the easiest and most hassle-free deployments of a hardware/software platform I’ve come across.”

MARK PETROCCHI

CTO, Align Tec

Preseem also enables our staff to monitor the network with helpful graphs and charts, giving us metrics to measure a client’s “quality of experience”. If a client’s connection is poor, we can proactively fix it before it becomes problematic.

Interestingly, most issues with a client connection usually originate at the router inside the house or business. Weak internal WiFi signals cause problems on the network for all devices on that network. We usually catch this soon and advise the client to move their router or upgrade to a device with a stronger signal.

I’ve asked my competitors why they’re not using Preseem, and the simple answer usually is “Price.”

Yes, it’s expensive for a small ISP like techCONNECT. But can you put a price on happy customers? I don’t think so.