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.

Cloud Computing and WAN Bandwidth

Cloud computing has become a major trend in IT services. It sometimes seems like there is a wild stampede to anything and everything in the cloud. What may get lost in the details is just how you actually get to the cloud. That mechanism is WAN bandwidth.

The WAN, or Wide Area Network, is often used to describe any connection beyond the boundary of the business office or corporate campus. Locations in town may be served by a MAN, or Metropolitan Area Network, that is limited to a small geographical area. Beyond that, you need WAN bandwidth to reach other locations or networks.

So, why is WAN bandwidth so important? It all has to do with traffic levels and where that traffic goes on the network. When data centers were all local, network traffic primarily stayed on the LAN. Once remote data centers were implemented for backup and disaster recovery, MAN or WAN bandwidth increased to accommodate the extra resource needs. Now that the server racks and disks have been replaced by cloud services, the lion’s share of network traffic goes to and from the cloud.

Where is the cloud? One of the most popular depictions of the cloud is the Internet. You don’t need to be formally involved with cloud computing to be using the Internet. Most everyone does. The reason that the cloud symbol is used for the Internet is that, as users, we don’t have to be concerned with the details of what all is on the Internet nor how it all interconnects. All we need to know is that we connect using a broadband Internet access service and use certain resources available through the Internet.

Now the term “cloud” is used to describe other services that may or may not have anything to do with the Internet. In may cases, it’s only the network that changes. The idea of having servers running applications and using storage owned by a service provider at some distant location isn’t unique to the Internet. What’s different about today’s cloud is that your connection is likely a private point to point data line that is used only to connect your business to the cloud services you require. With the Internet, many, many services and many, many users all share the same network.

This is where WAN bandwidth comes in. If you happen to be using cloud services on the Internet, you’ll be wanting a dedicated broadband Internet connection with enough bandwidth to ensure that your link is never congested. For non-Intenet services, you’ll want private line services with similarly adequate bandwidth. In some cases, latency and class of service are also critically important to your needs. That’s especially true for high performance applications such as financial trading or real time services such as enterprise VoIP, content delivery or telepresence.

Some clouds are private clouds in that they are owned by a particular organization for its own needs. The idea of having your own cloud is a way to share computing, applications, and storage among multiple company locations. The need for adequate WAN bandwidth still applies. You need to ensure that the traffic displaced from the LAN to the WAN still has a large enough pipe to flow through unobstructed.

Are you involved with private or public cloud computing as a user or supplier? You may have more bandwidth options that you realize. Find out by checking prices and availability of WAN bandwidth services for your business locations.



Note: Cloud networking diagram courtesy of Guivaloz on Wikimedia Commons.

Ethernet VPLS Extends Your LAN Network

Typical methodologies for connecting multiple business locations have included Frame Relay, VSAT satellite terminals, Internet-based VPNs and proprietary wireline networks constructed from point to point T1 lines. Now there’s a new technology that has performance and cost advantages that make it extremely attractive for branch offices, retail franchise, medical clinics and other businesses that need connectivity among many locations. It’s called Ethernet VPLS and it’s available now.

What is Ethernet VPLS and why is it better? The VPLS acronym stands for Virtual Private LAN service. That sounds a lot like a local area network, but run by a carrier and spread over a city, state or the entire country. That’s exactly what it is. Ethernet VPLS combines the advantages of Ethernet connectivity with the geographic service footprint and security of a MPLS IP-VPN network. The result is a layer 2 WAN service that safely extends your corporate LAN wherever you want it to go.

XO Communications, one of the country’s leading competitive carriers, is offering an Ethernet VPLS service that can transport both your IP and non-IP traffic. XO has an extensive nationwide fiber optic network and is a provider of Ethernet connectivity using both copper and fiber optic options. That gives them a lot of flexibility in hooking your diverse sites together.

For instance, XO can connect each of your business locations with Ethernet over Copper with speeds from 3 to 20 Mbps, Ethernet over Fiber for speeds from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps, and Broadband Wireless access in major metro areas with speeds from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps. All of these access options are scalable, so you can start with the bandwidth you need today and easily expand, location by location, as business activity dictates.

The beauty of Ethernet VPLS is that you maintain control of your network just as if you owned the wiring that interconnects all of your bridged LANs. You can maintain separate networking domains as if they were on the same LAN regardless of how far they are separated.

This is a switched layer-2 network service that can be configured as point to point, point to multipoint, or multipoint to multipoint fully meshed for any to any connectivity. If you’ve put a lot of time and effort into converging your voice, video and data networks, your investment is protected by four robust classes of service. These include real time, critical, priority and standard CoS. Enterprise VoIP and video multicasting have the resources they need to deliver high quality performance.

The WAN capability is there to support anything you want to do on your network. But the cost per Mbps beats competing technologies hands down. That’s a winning combination that will likely see Ethernet VPLS become a dominant WAN networking service in the near future. Why not put it to work for you right now, before your competitors catch on? Get more information and customized Ethernet VPLS pricing quotes to support your locations and applications. It’s a complementary service, with results fast.

A New Edge On Private IP Networks

So many companies have multiple business locations today, that IP network options have become cheaper and more available than ever before. A major player in this space is New Edge Networks, headquartered in Vancouver, Washington. New Edge specialized in private IP-based WANs (Wide Area Networks) that don’t use the public Internet. That gives them the edge on quality and performance in linking multiple business locations.

Why not the Internet? The largest network in the word certainly has proliferated over the last few decades. It connects just about everyone, everywhere on Earth at reasonable connection costs. That’s its advantage as a general purpose communications network and its limitation as a serious business network. Anyone and everyone can and do send just about anything and everything there is through the Internet. With network neutrality mandated, your critical transaction data gets exactly the same treatment as somebody on the other side of the globe Tweeting what they had for lunch.

The need for dependable performance, security and availability is what makes private networks attractive. Private networks are just that. They are privately owned and operated. There is no public access. Being a private entity, they are free to establish classes of service to guarantee that latency sensitive applications like voice and video conferencing have the priority to ensure low jitter and latency for optimum performance. New Edge, for instance offers six classes of service (CoS) on their network with service level agreements for each.

Strict control of network parameters makes possible the long desired goal of network convergence. Convergence merges separate data, voice and video networks into one single network that supports them all. Enterprise VoIP offers productivity features and cost savings, especially on a converged network. But voice is fragile, and your telephone calls can quickly turn to garbled mush on a “best effort” network like the Internet. Video conferencing, including telepresence services, also has great productivity and cost saving value. Like voice, real-time two-way video is fragile and breaks up with the slightest provocation. You need a solid network to support these high performance communication tools.

MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching private networks, a specialty of New Edge Networks, give your business the opportunity to connect multiple locations on one fully meshed private network. Each location only needs an access network connection to the MPLS “cloud” network. New Edge offers a variety of connection options that include T1 lines, Ethernet, wireless, and even DSL.

Since most small and midsize businesses don’t have large full-time IT staffs to manage wide area network services, New Edge Networks offers full network management services, including the critical LAN/WAN interconnection. This lets companies concentrate on their core business activities while knowing that their wide area network is being well taken care of.

Does your company have more than a couple of business locations? If so, private IP networks may work to your advantage. Find out how you can improve performance and perhaps save money at the same time with high value MPLS network services from New Edge and other top tier service providers.