But do you actually need more bandwidth? If you have a 128-Kbps ISDN circuit and want to run 100 simultaneous VoIP sessions at 8 Kbps, you definitely do. No QoS (Quality of Service) device in the world can compensate for that much traffic.
However, if you have enough WAN bandwidth to run your mission-critical applications, and other applications can be pushed aside, you are faced with two options: Get more WAN bandwidth or use a traffic shaper. The decision can come down to ROI (return on investment).
On the surface, calculating ROI is a simple matter: Determine how much additional bandwidth mission-critical applications need. Take the price of that bandwidth per month and divide by the cost of a traffic shaper. That tells you how long until you'll see a return. But there are other considerations:
If you buy more bandwidth, noncritical traffic will also increase--if the throughput is there, users will suck it up. This can mean a constant cat-and-mouse game.
Factor management time into the equation. To do traffic shaping, an administrator must keep watch on the traffic and spend time developing and seeking approval for a policy defining which traffic gets priority. When your bandwidth is plentiful and rarely saturated, you won't need to worry. But as bandwidth gets tight, the amount of time spent watching traffic and making decisions increases.
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