IP WAN over MPLS Advantages

When we think of IP wide area networks, the first thing that comes to mind is the Internet. While the Internet does have almost universal connectivity and modest cost to access, there are some serious issues when it comes to business applications. Bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss have no guarantees and few expectations. Security is a joke. But aren’t other methods to interconnect business locations costly and hard to manage?

It is possible to set up a private IP network that lets you use your familiar IP addressing schemes and avoid encryption, firewalls, tunnels, and additional hardware. You’ll gain a performance advantage compared to using VPN techniques over the Internet and save yourself the administrative headaches of trying to manage a WAN with inherently indeterminate characteristics. Who offers something like this? It’s TelePacific, one of the nation’s largest competitive carriers.

TelePacific’s 1Net is an IP VPN running on a private MPLS network, not the Internet. Since MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching can transport almost any protocol, it can be set up to mimic the Internet while keeping your data private. Only the locations that you set up can exchange traffic. No one outside of your user group can capture or view your data. You’ll have any to any connectivity within the group with security sufficient to address HIPPA or similar government regulations.

In fact, TelePacific set up just such a private IP Network for a medical imaging organization with 6 locations. They use it to transport patients’ private medical records among their location. Referring physicians can access patient imaging results within hours at their own computers. The system is also used for claims processing, patient scheduling and registration. Interestingly, this system also allows dedicated Internet access through a single firewall at corporate headquarters.

The TelePacific 1Net IP VPN has both cost and performance advantages over other secure networking solutions, including private line, ATM and Frame Relay. You can specify up to six different Classes of Service (CoS) to support sensitive real-time services such as VoIP telephone and teleconferencing. On Net, latency for all CoS is specified at 50 msec. That rises to just 100 msec for extended reach locations off the TelePacific network but still within the US. Network availability is 99.999% (5 nines) both on and off network locations.

The Classes of Service are CoS 1 for VoIP real time traffic, CoS2 for video conferencing and real time data traffic, CoS3 for high priority, delay sensitive business data like Ecommerce and Citrix, CoS4 for medium priority delay-sensisitive business data such as CRM and WebEx, CoS5 for general less delay sensitive business data like ERP, and CoS6 for best effort traffic with no prioritization. That’s typically Email and FTP.

Are you cringing at the cost and effort involved in linking your business locations by private lines or frustrated by the highly variable performance and difficulty in securing the Internet? Perhaps the best solution for your business needs is a private IP VPN based on MPLS networking. Check prices and features to compare with your other choices.



Note: MPLS network diagram courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

When More Bandwidth Doesn’t Help

You’re probably familiar with this scenario. You’ve had a T1 line or DS3 bandwidth circuit for years. Everything ran just fine until recently. Now, all of a sudden, the Internet just crawls and your new VoIP telephone system sounds like calls from the far side of the moon. Employees are peeved because they can’t get anything done. Customers are livid because they can’t even carry on a civil conversation over the phone. Management is getting hot under the collar. Better get more bandwidth on order, right?

Maybe. It’s entirely possible that you’ll call up your provider and double your dedicated Internet bandwidth only to find out that you still have the same problems and now you’re paying twice as much. Talk about adding insult to injury! What’s gone wrong here and what can you do to really fix it?

The problem is that we visualize broadband connections like water pipes. You can just see that traffic flowing smoothly through the pipe. Applications demand more capacity and the flow increases, just like opening a faucet wider. Obviously, the only way you’ll hit the limit on capacity is when you fully open all the faucets at once. Then each application, the lawn sprinkler, the shower, the dishwasher and the wash basin each get less than they would like.

The fix seems equally obvious. Just put in bigger pipes with higher capacity. The water meter will spin a lot faster, but now you can support a lot more users full-on and nobody will suffer a reduction in flow. The telecom equivalent of a bigger pipe is what is called in the industry a “bigger pipe.” That means a line with more Mbps or Gbps. The analogy is clear. Just order a bigger pipe and your troubles will be over. Or will they?

The snag in all of this is that network traffic isn’t homogenous like water. One water droplet may be just like the next. One Ethernet packet may be not at all like the next. Some applications, like file transfers, just brute force move packets from one place to another. Others, like video conferencing or VoIP telephony are highly sensitive to latency, jitter, lost packets and packets arriving out of sequence. If your network gets congested, the file transfer will work fine. It will just take a little longer. Get in the same situation with real-time applications and they’ll crumble in the battle for packet transfers.

So why not just increase bandwidth when business grows to the point where more users are trying to do more things simultaneously? It’s likely that at some point you’ll have to do just that. But also know that simply adding more capacity may not make a big difference. Why? It’s because some applications will take as much bandwidth as you give them regardless of what they really need. If you simply double the bandwidth, Web pages may load a little faster, files might move a little faster, but the telephone and video may still break up mid-conversation.

There probably is some line speed that is so fast that everything will work at the same time with no problems. That might be 10x or even 100x what you have now. You’ll pay a fortune just to have enough capacity at hand to support rare moments when everyone is on the phone and watching YouTube videos at the same time the system is doing full backups. Is that really necessary?

No. Not at all. What you really need is a way to prioritize traffic so that preference is given to real-time two-way streams that are extremely sensitive to network congestion. You need to establish CoS or Class of Service controls that carve out a certain capacity to meet the needs of your VoIP phone system and video conferencing system and then divvy up the rest among lower priority processes. You can go further to push time insensitive file transfers and backups into the background so that they won’t interfere with anyone working online.

That solution is called the converged network. It’s more than just plugging everything into the same LAN and WAN. You need Class of Service both on your LAN and on the WAN. Techniques for the LAN are well established. The WAN is another matter if you are using the Internet for access to your VoIP provider. The Internet strips off those CoS tags in the name of network neutrality. One solution is to use a SIP Trunk to connect to a single provider for VoIP and Internet broadband so that CoS can be maintained on that link. Another is to keep the broadband you have, but use a separate point to point connection to your VoIP provider.

MPLS networks can maintain CoS among multiple business locations. You may be using Internet VPN connections to make those multiple connections, but with limited success if voice or video are involved.

Another interesting option is the “intelligent bandwidth” approach being offered by Telnes, a major competitive carrier. They’ve developed a technique called IP Priority Class of Service to maintain CoS on an Internet circuit using managed routers. This recognizes that most of the congestion issues occur on the link between you and the core of the Internet. By cleaning up that connection, real time applications, such as hosted VoIP, can run much more smoothly that they will on uncontrolled Internet broadband services.

Are you suffering slowdowns, application breakage and poor telephone voice quality? You may need more bandwidth or you may just need better bandwidth management. Before you go out and spend a bundle to no avail, get a complementary telecom engineering consultation from Telnes and other competitive service providers and review your options. You may be able to get results for a fraction of what you thought you had to spend.

SIP Trunking Providers Want Your Bandwidth

The telephone industry is changing. Not long ago, the standard setup for most companies was an in-house PBX system managing dozens, hundreds or thousands of phones. For outside calls, the most cost effective approach has been to bring in ISDN PRI trunk lines with 23 local and/or long distance lines each. Even small companies chose key telephone systems that can handle two to six outside lines. Those setups are changing fast.

There are two strong trends in the industry right now. One is cloud based hosted PBX telephone and the other is SIP trunking. They work perfectly together, but you can also have SIP trunking without cloud services.

A telephone trunk is a number of telephone lines all bundled together. This can be a wire bundle, such as a multi-line copper cable. It can also be an electrical bundle on a single line. ISDN PRI trunks, for instance, bundle 23 separate phone lines plus Caller ID and switching on a single T1 line. A SIP trunk is a telephone trunk line designed specifically to work with IP phones in VoIP telephone systems. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching technology used in VoIP in lieu of SS7, which is used in traditional switched circuit telephony.

So, why are SIP trunks such a hot item right now? It’s because a SIP trunk can be connected directly to your network or IP PBX to bring in multiple lines from your VoIP carrier. On a converged local area network, you are already running SIP. Why go to the trouble to converting to another protocol just to gain access to the public telephone network?

SIP trunks are also how you connect to a hosted PBX system as a cloud service. Companies are rapidly discovering that the per-seat cost of a cloud based telephone service is less than they pay now when you count the personnel, operating and maintenance costs of an in-house phone system. With hosted PBX, you no longer have to invest in new hardware every few years and your system is always being maintained and upgraded by the service provider.

It stands to reason that SIP trunking providers want your telephone business, but why do they want your bandwidth?

The reason that your carrier wants to provide you with both telephone lines and Internet bandwidth is so they can guarantee the quality of your phone calls. With traditional telephony, the telephone and computer networks are kept completely separate and cannot possibly interfere with each other. One of the cost saving advantages of enterprise VoIP solutions is that they use the corporate data network for everything. To make that work, you need to prioritize voice packets so that your phone conversations don’t distort or break up no matter what the computers are doing.

When your SIP trunking provider delivers both telephone and Internet service on your trunk line, they prioritize packets using CoS or Class of Service tags. These tags tell all equipment that recognizes them how to handle different types of traffic to ensure service quality. Not all bandwidth providers do this, so if you mix various line services you can wind up undoing your carefully engineered network quality.

There’s also a cost advantage, especially for small businesses who get both telephone and broadband on one line instead of two. You don’t even need IP phones to take advantage of this service. The provider will install an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that can connect to conventional analog phones and your broadband router.

Now that you know why SIP Trunking providers want your bandwidth, why not find out what sort of deal they’ll make to get it? Request competitive quotes for telephone trunking, dedicated Internet access and cloud hosted PBX services now.