BMO Tools

The Bandwidth Monitoring and Optimisation (BMO) Tools project developed user-friendly and intelligent free software to help network managers to monitor and optimise their Internet connections.

In 2006, Aptivate began a programme of working with the Kenya Education Network (KENET), an ISP for educational institutions, to improve the speed and reliability of Internet access in Kenyan universities. We visited a number of these universities and worked with KENET to develop solutions to the problems that we found, using the tools and techniques in the BMO Book as our starting point.

The results of our research are discussed in our BMO Position Paper. One of the most important outcomes was the need for better understanding of how Internet bandwidth was being used, and by whom. Although the existing tools described in the BMO Book could be used for this, they were difficult to use, required heavy training, and were often forgotten or unused. We felt that the development and free availability of user-friendly tools would help network administrators to manage their networks better. Thus began the BMO Tools project.

We are building a freely distributable package of network administration tools, to assist good network practice. It will include software, documentation, training materials and simulation and learning tools. provide documentation along with network and client tools

The first software deliverable from this project is pmGraph, a tool for simple graphical network monitoring.