San Diego (CA) – Poor Skype or VoIP call quality is often the result of competing traffic and the guys at Propel Software Group have something that can fix it.  The company’s Personal Bandwidth Manager is a client side application that prioritizes traffic so that critical time sensitive data, like VoIP calls, get out first.  You can think of it as Quality of Service (QoS) on the desktop side.

Propel's Personal Bandwidth Manager demo at Demofall 07 San Diego

Propel’s president and CEO David Murray demonstrated the software at the Demofall 07 conference in San Diego.  You can see a video clip of the demonstration above.  First Murray launched the Skype test call with PBM turned off.  The played back call was scratchy and skipped because a file upload delayed Skype’s data packets.  After turning PBM on, the same call was made to the Skype test number and the replayed call was marginally better.  Other journalists in the room commented that both calls sounded basically the same.  You can make that determination yourself by listening to the video.

The PBM software also has a bandwidth monitor that shows what applications are currently accessing the network.  Murray said that many programs, like Windows Media Player, try to download data even when they are supposedly inactive.

Propel is currently offering a free beta test of their software by invitation only.  You can sign up for the test here.

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