rate openflow provides cross vendor communication as an abstraction of vendor specific internal programming initially new or unknown flows forwarded from one of the access points 130 a n are sniffed to detect a progressive download deep packet inspection can reveal a file name and an encoding rate of the multimedia file one or more rules are generated with respect to the multimedia file for transmission and implementation at one or more of the access points 130 a n other factors that can affect a target download rate include network conditions and characteristics of the file for example a multimedia file that users tend to halted after a short time can be downloaded more slowly by reducing the priority also a download rate can be slowed down for advertisements many implementation specific scenarios are possible more generally the sdn controller 110 centralizes data plane decision making for the access points 130 a n to do so the access points 130 a n are configured to concede layer 2 routing decisions to the sdn controller 110 by forwarding packets to the sdn controller 110 for routing instructions the sdn controller can use input gathered across the network to make layer 2 routing decisions for the packets which are communicated back to the forwarding one of the access points 130 a n in one embodiment routing decisions are made as a reaction to new or unknown flows in another embodiment access points are pre configured by the sdn controller.