The Agnostics vendors of bandwidth place are unwilling to put all their bets on a single technology, and have chosen to implement rate control and multiple queuing in their products.

Net Reality's Wise Wan is a suite of products built on the Wise Wan 200 hardware platform. The Wan Sentry is a traffic monitoring probe that feeds WAN flow information to Wan Shaper, the traffic management component. What distinguishes the Wise Wan products is that they live on the WAN side of the enterprise's access router (in contrast to the Packet Shaper products, which draw inferences about the WAN's activities through the access router). The Wise Wan 200 hardware platform can support as many as four connections with capacities ranging from 56Kbits/sec to 2.048Mbits/sec, the E1 rate. The Wise Wan product sells for $ 14,995.

Check Point Software (Redwood City, CA) is the market share leader in firewalls, and the stateful inspection techniques used in its Firewall-1 are useful in identifying and classifying traffic flows for bandwidth management with the company's FloodGate-1 product. The policy-definition process for the firewall and the Check Point VPN product is also readily integrated with bandwidth management policies, and administrators that have experience with the other two products will have an easier time configuring Flood-Gate-1. In addition, it seems likely that groups and priorities defined for security reasons will be defined in much the same way for bandwidth allocation reasons.

The FloodGate-1 product has three tiers: a GUI platform for the user interface, a management server for storing and distributing bandwidth management policy, and FloodGate-1 Modules for installation at each network access point. Unlike the previously discussed products, the FloodGate-1 components are software-only, running on Sun Solaris and Windows NT. (The GUI also runs on Windows 95 and other Java platforms.) The retail price for FloodGate-1 is $ 9,995.

Guidepost, from Net Guard, uses stateful inspection to classify flows much as FloodGate-1 does. (Net Guard also makes the Guardian firewall, which uses stateful inspection.) Guidepost is also a software-only product, running on Windows NT 4.0 and selling for $ 6,995.

Net Road Traffic Ware, from Ukiah Software, is the first bandwidth management product to integrate with LDAP3-compliant directory services, including NDS, Netscape's Directory Server, and ultimately, Microsoft's Active Directory. Clearly, the vast majority of objects and attributes relevant to defining bandwidth policies will exist somewhere in enterprise directories; it would hardly make sense to create a new directory to store the bandwidth information.

Like Check Point and Net Guard, Ukiah Software also produces a firewall product that can be integrated with its bandwidth manager. Net Road Traffic Ware is software-only, running on Windows NT. It may be worth pointing out that the firewall and the bandwidth manager need to be in roughly the same place, either just outside or just inside the access router, so running both processes on a single server may sometimes be justified. Traffic Ware prices range from $2,195 for a 128Kbit/sec model to $ 9,995 for a 100Mbit/sec version.