Meritel is the first to offer Powerburst to broadband subscribers. Powerburst uses the Token Bucket Theory for managing traffic. Below is an exerpt from Motorola describing the Token Bucket Theory and how it is used with a 256Kbps base service plan. Meritel currently offers base service plans up 6Mbps so the refill rate is even faster.

BANDWIDTH CAPPING
Bandwidth capping is done on a per access point module basis. All subscriber modules that
register to an access point module will receive the same bandwidth cap information. The tokenbucket
schema that is used for bandwidth capping consists of a “bucket” who’s volume defines the
burst rate and is “filled with tokens” at a rate defined by the data rate. When user data is controlled
by Canopy bandwidth capping, traffic is only passed if enough tokens exist within the bucket. As
traffic is passed, each packet uses some of the tokens.
For example, imagine an access point module is configured for a 256 Kbps continuous rate with a
10 Mbit burst to each of the registered subscriber modules. A 10 Mbit token bucket is created for a
subscriber. This bucket will be filled with tokens at the rate of 256 Kbps. If no transmissions were
to occur, then the bucket will continue to fill at the rate until it reaches its 10 Mbit token capacity.
When user traffic is identified, a check is made to see if that many tokens exist in the bucket. If
there are enough, then the tokens are removed that the user data is sent on its way. If there are
not enough tokens, the the user data is discarded.
To the user, the schema has two intended effects:
• Traffic that requires data streams of less than 10 Mbits in size are delivered at the
maximum supported rate by the air interface.
• Large downloads (such as a Windows update or MPEG file) are limited to 256 Kbps after
their initial burst runs out.

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