Other vendors focus on route optimization. Most businesses have more than one access line going to different Internet providers or other networks. Tools from vendors such as BoostWorks, FatPipe Networks, RouteScience Technologies, and Sockeye Networks use techniques to balance and manage traffic between multiple circuits.

Sockeye continually monitors traffic patterns and routes traffic to the best circuit, depending on performance and cost. For example, if a line is approaching capacity and a business is charged extra for going above that capacity, Sockeye's Global Route appliance will direct traffic to another circuit. The vendor charges a monthly fee based on access speed, ranging from $1,200 to $5,000 per month per site.

The monthly fee wasn't a deterrent for TTSG Internet Service Inc. The Web-hosting company had been spending about $16,000 extra a month because it exceeded its allocated bandwidth on the three high-speed links connecting its data center to the Web. After deploying Sockeye's Global Routing appliance, TTSG's extra charges dropped to $900 a month, president Scott Ellentuch says. After paying for Sockeye's service, TTSG saves about $10,000 a month on bandwidth costs.

RouteScience offers a similar service for Web hosting and virtual private network applications. But unlike some other products, it doesn't rely on Border Gateway Protocol routing to make performance-routing decisions. It measures performance and packet loss and ships traffic on the most available line, usually making that determination more quickly and accurately than Border Gateway Protocol. The product is priced at $15,000 for sites with T1 access and $60,000 to $90,000 for OC-3 and above.

RouteScience helped wireless service provider Qualcomm Inc. solve a problem balancing traffic between two Internet connections, one running at 21 Mbps and the other at 11 Mbps. "We were seeing saturation on one of them," says Norm Fjeldheim, Qualcomm's senior VP and CIO. With new applications in the pipeline, Fjeldheim had been planning to add a third 11-Mbps line, but he was concerned the traffic wouldn't be balanced among the three lines.

After testing RouteScience's appliance, Qualcomm activated the third line just as high volumes of Internet traffic hit the Web site for a software download. "We had enough capacity to handle tens of thousands of downloads in a 48-hour period," Fjeldheim says. "For us, it wasn't an ROI play, it was a technology-architecture enabler."