By Khali Henderson

tw telecom announced Monday the national availability of a true bandwidth on demand service, enabling customers to change their bandwidth in real time. The service is available immediately through the company’s direct and indirect sales channels in the 75 major metro markets tw telecom serves across the country.

Called Dynamic Capacity, the offer is the second in tw telecom’s Intelligent Network service portfolio. The first, launched in May, was its Enhanced Management, giving customers real-time network performance management information. The third offer, which is not yet available, will offer automatic application acceleration, wherein applications will signal to the network the need for an increase in bandwidth via APIs.

With tw telecoms Dynamic Capacity service, business customers are able to scale their E-Line Business Ethernet bandwidth and capacity without service interruption. Specifically, customers are able to double or triple their committed capacity (2-MBps – 1GBps) on a real-time or scheduled basis using new tools in the MyPortal management interface.

“It really gets past the traditional telecommunications model where customers have to submit an order for every change. It allows them to truly control their own destiny,” said Adam Saenger, senior director of product for tw telecom.

Saenger cites the examples of a scaling bandwidth temporarily for a planned promotion and being able to know the cost in advance and assign the expense to a specific project or department. Another example, he said, is replicating the desktop on a recurring basis a few times a week; higher bandwidth makes the task faster. Accommodating a video conference on the fly might be another example.

Dynamic Capacity dovetails with the Enhanced Management service, by allowing businesses to respond to network conditions in real time, Saegner said. Enhanced Management shows users networking performance information (e.g., bandwidth utilization, class-of-service utilization, packet loss, latency and jitter) on an end-to-end and segment-by-segment basis through tw telecoms MyPortal Web-based information management tool. Businesses can then up bandwidth where needs are greatest.

Saenger said Dynamic Capacity differs from burstability in that it’s deliberate and also predictable. That means businesses proactively choose to scale their bandwidth and they know the costs of doing so in advance, rather than getting charged a premium for overages at the end of the month.

The service is available through tw telecom’s indirect sales channel. Training on the service is available to partners.