Yes, bandwidth iQ does use rate shaping but not as its core technology. It is not always the best way of managing traffic and under some circumstances can cause more problems than it fixes - many more packets on your network for example and a very large overhead of having to manage each session separately. We have an advanced algorithm that detects and decides when rate shaping would be appropriate and, as always we allow you to override our predictions and set your own policy.

Our core technology is proprietary and secret but based on bit rate pacing which is exact and allows us to manage entire traffic streams rather than each session. This results in one policy to manage for one client, for example if we were to use rate shaping one client could open 10's of TCP sessions for one server session.

For example when web browsing one page requires a separate TCP session for each graphic, button, link and the page itself and they all get open at the same time plus the user can open many pages at once. Rate shaping thereby also makes it difficult if not impossible to limit an entire user to a fair bandwidth chunk. Obviously the other problem is that it only works on TCP traffic.