BandwidthBar

Broadband ADSL sellers always talk about shaped and unshaped offerings. The difference in price is often noticeable and so is the difference in performance. For the average person the difference between these two options can seem vague at best. Certainly no service provider ever actually explains fully what the two terms mean and yet the choice you make for your internet connectivity can have a huge impact on your broadband experience.

 

Shaped and unshaped are terms used to describe how information sent between your computer and the ISP is treated. As an example, when your computer tries to send or receive email it opens a connection to a mail server and the two computers communicate with each other. How they communicate is known as a protocol. Shaping gives priority to certain protocols over others giving certain actions more bandwidth than others.

 

Most broadband ADSL packages are shaped and give priority to so-called business protocols. These include the protocols used for emails, browsing and standard browser-based downloads. When the network is busy priority is given to these protocols over the others. Shaped broadband is fine for your average user that only really uses the Internet for email, browsing and banking but for people that use the Internet for other things it can be constrictive.

 

People that use their broadband ADSL for activities like online gaming, VOIP, Skype or online trading will find that shaped broadband leaves these applications with the short end of the stick. These protocols do not carry the same priority as the ‘business’ protocols so when the network is busy they lose out on the bandwidth. The result is slower data transfer rates and increased latency that may cause some of these applications to either perform poorly or just not at all.

 

Shaped broadband is less expensive because the service provider can control, to a lesser extent, how much bandwidth a person is using. Since ‘non-business’ protocols are the lowest priority they do not take as much bandwidth. Unshaped broadband, however, shares the available bandwidth equally amongst the protocols which could mean that certain users may actually be using a lot more bandwidth than the others. Keeping the bandwidth ready and available despite this is one of the reasons unshaped broadband is so much pricier.

 

The decision between shaped and unshaped broadband depends entirely on the user’s perspective. A user that is only planning on using the Internet for email, browsing and the occasional download will have no trouble using a shaped broadband package. For users that want to play online, trade online or use other applications to download things from the Internet shaped broadband will just be too limiting. For these applications unshaped broadband is the way to go.

 

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